* You'll have a better luck pitching things to people who you have a pre-existing relationship for. Your business has a blog. That blog's purpose in life is to generate pre-existing relationships with people similarly situated to your customers (and, relatedly, to talk about what your customers care about). Talk about what they are talking about and link to their posts. Comment on their blogs. Then, when you email them about your project, you don't get sent straight to the spam box.
* Pitch your product as something their readers will be interested in, with a specifically tuned pitch that reminds them that you are a) already trusted by them and b) know what they want. People almost always end up getting links out of me when they send me an email that demonstrates they really have been reading for as long as they say they have.
* Free licenses are the best money you've never had to spend. Give them out liberally.
* Focus on blogs one step up the social pecking order from you. TechCrunch gets probably a thousand emails a day. Bob's File Format Blog probably gets one every three weeks. Guess which one of these is absolutely dying for anyone to pay attention to them? That's right. This gets you a bit of exposure. Gradually work your way up the exposure chain -- after you get X level of renown, start mailing bloggers at X+1 rather than 10 * X. Get mentioned on the blogs that are read by the bloggers you want to influence and you might not even need to mail them at all.
If you sold your SaaS as a white label product or OEM through partners or affiliates, that would be another way of distributing it.
But the traditional marketing concepts, like the four Ps (distribution being the Place), fit better with physical products IMHO.
Marketing, actually. =)
Differentiation is pretty tough too (but integration has been easy!).
Is the trouble getting users or just being picked up in the press? (both non-trivial problems)
The hardest part is getting your community engaged, and loving the site so much they will tell their friends. Its getting AdWords users converting into real, long-term members. It's about getting your users to love your site so much that they couldn't live without it.
My takeaway: the media coverage/PR feels great and seems important, but it has nothing to do with the long term success or sustainability of your site. Build something people want and love - that's more important. Get a small, but rabid user base. Get them to spread the love.
Until you solve this, there is little point in trying to get featured on high profile media.
The key might lie in providing social proof (that people actually use your services). If there is none, visitors following links from features won't be very useful. They might be interested enough to check out your landing page (content skimming), but getting the user to slow down and really get familiar with you requires more. It's like channel hopping with tv. You skim through a number of options and see if anything interesting comes up. But the scale of options is different. You might be able to skim through hundreds of websites in one sitting with tabbed browsing. That's not a lot of time per site.
http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking...
If you find it useful, pls let me know and I'll submit it to HN. I don't want to be the guy that submits everything he writes.
(actually, I'm selling about as fast as I can get servers up, so marketing is not high on the priority list right now)
check out http://prgmr.com/xen/
Horrible, no?
I'm moving to a design based on http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/ - very minimalist (when I'm done, most words on that page will be links to more information)
The idea is that I have no taste. I can come up with something that conveys the idea, but I'm pretty much operating on blind trust when choosing a designer.
I can give you a long list of links to designs that I've got from people which were either clearly bad, or that other people told me were horrible.
In my business, credibility is very important. Well, that, and price, but I'm the cheapest of my competitors by quite a lot, so it's really only credibility I need to worry about. A web presence is part of that.
I was also approached about writing a book on the subject, so I imagine that will help: http://nostarch.com/xen.htm though I clearly have missed the hype sweet-spot.
Cloud9 sells software to tour operators and other travel suppliers and, unfortunately, our potential customers are not very internet savvy, making it rather difficult for us to reach potential customers.
