Ask HN: How did your startup get traction?
Our website has a modestly useful application that provides results that are slightly better than our well-known competitors. Our results are MUCH better than what an average consumer would get on their own without using us or our competitors.
Customers have offered very strong testimonials after using our service, invoking the name of God or saying that we're lifesavers. Improvements we've made for some of them have been very dramatic.
We are not well known (wouldn't be surprised if you never heard of us), but we have been mentioned in the news (like NYTimes, WSJ, Reader's Digest) in print, on TV, in blogs. We've won a few awards in our industry (like a Best-Of-[year] at an annual industry conference).
Our service is something you'd only personally use one or two times now, and then maybe it would be several months or years before you'd be in a situation to use it again. This might be the biggest challenge facing us. Getting traction seems easier for a site that you'd check every day like facebook or HN.
Because the use of our service depends on whether it applies to your situation, we are offering something that is only applicable to maybe 5% of the general population at any given moment.
The industry is boring. It takes less than 10 seconds or 2 sentences to say what we do, but it isn't something people enjoy talking about. I'm trying to come up with some similar industry for you to imagine -- maybe going to the dentist or refinancing your mortgage.
Edit (reason: collating details relevant to my company's situation here for new readers' convenience) One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of thing can be done in their situation. But every time I go on a random forum and ask people if they know it can be done, all the smarty-pants reply and say Yeah-I-Already-Knew-That. I mean ... who's going to admit ignorance, really?
Many thanks in advance! (Tis my first post so apologies if I screwed up anything.)