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betaout

6 karma · joined September 7, 2012

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betaout··on Show HN: Paseo – Beautiful open-source coding agent interface
I am in love with Paseo. I really want to express my gratitude for building this and saving me so much time and energy. I have been a heavy user of conductor.build before switching off completely to Paseo.

please keep on doing such awesome work.

betaout··on Shifu: A Smart Way To Manage Your To Do List On Your Smartphone
To-do Automation. I love the ability of this app to automate creation of my tasks from phone callbacks, simple reminders etc. Great jobs guys.
betaout··on Ask HN: At what point did you just start working on a prototype?
Why don't you outsource some of the work. At least version 0.1 - you will get a working prototype and market validation as well.
betaout··on One week since our launch...and...
Thanks, but it is full of typos as did it from my mobile. Anyways best of luck with your venture.
betaout··on Ask HN: At what point did you just start working on a prototype?
Prototype can be as small as Wireframes, Product Specs, HTML mockups. You dont need to change/leave your job to do that.

If you have been living with the idea for few weeks/months are also very passionate about it. Three four nights or weekends are sufficient to start with the sketches and wireframes.

Once you have it ready, show it to few friends, industry experts you know and iterate until you will confident to take the next plunge. Because after that there is no going back.

betaout··on Ask HN: Review my startup, bcontext.com
Its better to give away for free than undercharge. Why dont you give 30 or 60 days free trial instead.

Give away discount coupons on sites like appsumo. But undercharging might set you back. I think pricing should be based on value pricing.

betaout··on One week since our launch...and...
Launch is just a start. Remember the golden saying of Reid Hoffman - "if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

So you have crossed one of the greatest hurdles - that is launch. Rest is bit easy now.

1. You need to focus on marketing now. It starts from your site.

2. Try to get some of your friends to signup. Analyse deeply what are the actions they are doing versus what you have expected them to do.

3. Focus on that one thing which you think is the highlight of your product. Tweak it, re-tweak it until it really stands apart from all your other offerings.

4. Go to local events, try to showcase it to any crowd you can get your hands on.

5. If you have a little budget, try to do content marketing. Try educating people in your niche what are the problems they are facing. You can start doing that on your company blog or other blogs on your niche.

Be your strongest critic, and you will continuously evolve.

betaout··on Ask HN: How do you curate your address book?
Windows Phone has a great integration with Facebook, that surely helps. But a lot of my contacts are divided across my personal gmail, official emails, LinkedIn and Facebook.

But surely my address book if far away for being complete. Either few are missing phone numbers, emails, or pics.

betaout··on Defining A Growth Hacker: How Growth Hackers Changed Marketing
This term is another new marketing jargon in lines of Social Media Guru, Analytics Ninja, Blogger Outreach program Specialist .. and so on...

This guys does which every bootstrapped founder or a good marketer do.

betaout··on Ask HN: mass-submitting your pitch on forums (etc) during launch?
That's still a spam. Moderators always treat new account created with pinch of salt and can be very aggressive as well. A new account asking a question, and new account answering it. This will surely be treated as spam.
betaout··on Ask HN: Review my startup, bcontext.com
As someone whose favourite apps ate Skitch and Evernote (on iPad), I loved your product. Annotating a doc, and then sending an email, and then searching in my sent emails on desktop, has always been a pain. Skitched solved it to a great extend, but it was limited to just images. I think your product is a great tool, for users like me.

You pricing needs some reworking, as I think you are undercharging.

Best of luck with bcontext.

betaout··on Ask HN: mass-submitting your pitch on forums (etc) during launch?
Refrain from it.

Since you will be doing mass posting, forum moderators will very quickly catch you doing that, and probably will ban you.

This might do more harm. Its better going to events nearby you live and doing a talk with smart plugin of your product at the end.

betaout··on Ask HN: How do you find clients?
Twitter Lists can be very powerful.

- Create list of potential clients you want to work with. - Get their twitter accounts, and create a list containing their twitter handles. Name the list something cool (Wedding Businesses to watch)

- You will have a list of tweets from people you might get work in near future.

- Engage with them on Twitter.

- After 3-4 INTELLIGENT replies - all of sudden you are in the online friends category with them

- You dont need to pitch now, if anyone of them is interested they will find about your website from your Twitter Bio and will call/email/message you.

It really had worked for me. I was spending 20-30 mins on that list daily.