Ask HN: Kickstart-sharing | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Kickstart-sharing

5 pointsMrQuincle8 comments

There are currently a huge number of startups kickstarting products. And therefore there is wealth of information that can be shared. However, we don't!

On the moment I am the 1000th person compiling lists of tech journalists, compiling lists of probably interested backers, etc. I am crazy enough to go to the individual webpages of people that bought similar products to send them a message in advance. Just to get the proverbial ball rolling.

I don't like to be the 1000th person. :-) If we as a startup community want to be faster than large companies we have to share more!

I was thinking of sharing my Google spreadsheets, but I don't want journalists to get spam because of my lists.

Are there some informal ways to start such kickstart-sharing?

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I have things semi-automated w.r.t. obtaining the websites of the kickstarters of a particular project.

https://github.com/mrquincle/superscripts/tree/master/harves...

This still requires you to visit the website of individual backers and contact them personally.

I am working on a pre-kickstarter marketing my project at the moment and I love the idea of not having to do what you mentioned the 1001st time in history :) Maybe we should create some kind of startup-knowledge-sharing community. Your contribution would allow you to use the knowledgebase. What do you think?

Yes, exactly! What would be a very fast way to create such a community?

There are startups focussed on helping kickstarters -- things like the rewards or customer service. Most that I have seen are targeting funded projects (for obvious reasons).

I'm curious as to how you contact them. Do you send a cookie cutter email to each journalist?

I have a part that I write for a subset of journalists, for example for journalists that are into gadgets, or mainstream technology, or green technology. Then I prepend this with something personal about their work. My response rate is around 90%. It is a lot of work though! :-)

Thats pretty cool! would love to share that list with some of my entrepreneur friends that need them. You can share dropbox link if you like.

I am looking for something that allows control about the quality of the emails that are gonna be sent to that list.

So, for example someone publicly vetting for someone else in some way. Just as a lot of sharing sites (i.e. couchsurfing) it must be possible to build up a reputation or to convey that you are serious.

Also, signing something that you will make the email fun to read or worth their while might be an option.

Just thinking out loud.

The ideal case would be journalists that organize this for themselves. "This is how you should contact me". :-)

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