Ask HN: Marketing strategies for a difficult-to-market aggregation of services?

1 pointsfatefree12y ago0 comments

Over the past several years I've been building a site to help me organize disjointed parts of my life. I love to track things, but I hated using different apps and different sites to do it because I felt more disorganized having everything spread out all over the place. So I built a site to track different parts of your life in one place, with small applications called trackers (ie Tasks, Journals, Dreams, Recipes, Cholesterol, etc).

Recently I decided to take a shot and change course from working on this as a hobby to trying to make a side business out of it. I'm immune to worrying about whether it succeeds or fails because I use it extensively for myself, but I think it has value for people who like to track things and stay organized.

Anyway, I offer a subscription service to use the site, and I'm just now getting ready to try to market it. But its inherently difficult to market because the site is essentially an aggregation of smaller applications that may or may not already exist as standalone apps. Because the site contains so many trackers, putting an individual tracker head to head against one built specifically for that purpose (ie my Task Tracker vs Remember The Milk), my tracker will have less features. This was an intentional decision to keep things simple, but again it makes it difficult to market individual trackers (unless they dont exist).

I'm looking for some advice on how I might go about marketing this. I'm going to consider simple ads on either forums, google adwords, etc to start. I also implemented a referral system to hopefully persuade users to do some of the marketing themselves, although that will take time to be effective.