2. I would not recommend making another thread, since that is bordering on spammy.
there's also publications that's specific for local lifestyle magazines that's more relevant for me. for example, chicago mag is part of modern luxury and they have l.a. ny miami "mags" etc... you can pay to have it blasted to their user base which is a double opt-in newsletter subscription (risky move that worked for us bc its so targeted - chicks that like lifestyle sht). what i did was get that blasted to approximately 150,000 people (60,000 in chicago) with majority of reader base residing in la, ny, chicago. their average click through rate is 2-4%. the email ad was cleverly designed with a shopping giveaway so when people click through they come to the landing page and then the viral coefficient kicks in to get their friends to also register to get notified when we launch. if i had to do it again i think one can optimize the sht out of this to make it so much better. my was a half-hack job but still worked great.
also our current landing page was optimally designed so that it would naturally get good upvotes on stumbleupon. we had 3k people per month hitting our site via stumbleupon.
reppio being a social commerce player can leverage off of other social commerce sites pushing to svpply and even tumblr to get users baited with pictures and then come to the landing page to give us email addresses. all of those combined plus on the ground and various other tactics led to a significant amount of email addresses ahead of launch. that set we started to blast.
maybe i was premature in saying that techcrunch/tech sources wouldn't be that relevant since there are writers who write in this space and we did hundreds of hours of work on this but to no avail (we also didn't want to hire a pr person to run this and in hindsight i don't think i know pr that well). however, i didn't want to leave it to chance and so i hedged all positions for launch. now i'm sure the real hard work begins in trying to find product market fit / see how i can get re-engagement up from my core set of users. i'm in the business of engagement; that is the single most important variable for my business. just ask that chick who cut a check to pinterest very early on even thought they had a couple thousand users.
this is why i'm going to HN to get feedback from a variety of people. i know that my demographic will be geared toward women. that's natural way for my business to shift focus. but there is a player who has succeeded in balancing a 60/40 split in user base in the lifestyle category. and asking men who probably don't like shopping and seeing if there is any way i can make it cool for you guys to want to engage with my site was the goal of this post.
2. i'm a lifestyle site. why do i care about going to techcrunch or any other tech site to debut my site? it's irrelevant. we also had a landing page up for 2 months while working on the site to grab email addresses where we mixed giveaways and share options to get users. how many of these are "legitimate?" 7,000 are technically speaking; out of the much greater number that just input their email addresses and has yet to verify. time well tell if they're "legitimate" - but shooting for more than 10% at max is probably out of the question. nevertheless, don't question my numbers.
why can you not help by answering my question? isn't that what hn is for? if you downvote a guy who had 1 fake account set up to get things moving (which in fact i technically didn't. just had one of my friends sign up and comment so the aforementioned comment is not valid).
if you cry foul play than you should never vote on reddit since the entire site launched with fake comments to begin with.
you should also go on and comment on dropbox acquisition of mailbox bc mailbox's counter. yeup that was fake.
you should then monitor techcrunch every time a tinder article gets published and comment there since the entire supply side was created with fake hot girls to begin with.
oh yeah btw. techcocktail. their monthly stupid competition that is the core part of their business? it's all fake. mechanical turk wins the race on the last day of voting after 11am. true story.
