Dan Shipper writes about startups, sales, getting early customers, and building a blog audience, drawing on his own company experiences.
HN commenters call his posts on sales and first customers a great blueprint for kickstarting startup sales.
Your idea is good (52 papers a week).
Let me give you a tip to increase your luck.
Put some more info about you on your site.
I'm not seeing it.
If it's there it's to hard to find.
Important people might stop by and think "who is this guy and what can he do for me". There is no way to know what exactly you know or are good at. Make it easy for people to connect or bring opportunity to you.
Be more like Dan Shipper.
( see http://danshipper.com/ I don't know him but I know who he is and what he can do ..)
I'd focus talking to potential customers and building out whatever features make the product "minimally viable" for them. If you're pretty sure you know what they need out of your product (which, unless you have credit card numbers, you probably shouldn't be), get your payment system sorted, throw Google Analytics in, and launch.
At that point you can start selling, selling, and selling some more. Dan Shipper wrote a great post about this today: http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made
The advice in this post combined with Dan Shipper's awesome post the other day (http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made) serves as a great blueprint for how to kickstart your startup's sales.
Not sure what it was about Dan's post, but it really resonated with me and motivated me to make 8 sales pitches yesterday. Already got 2 replies, one negative, one positive. Point being, if you don't shoot, you can't score.
I don't think this is true. I've flagged several videos as spam -- they were re-uploads of other videos to capture ad fees -- and have never seen a single one of them removed. The speed of this takedown is probably a coincidence.
EDIT: Typo fix.
SECOND EDIT: Go read this, if you missed it here on HN:
The choices are fake and the truth is all made up
http://danshipper.com/the-choices-are-fake-and-the-truth-is-all-made-up
Hey guys great to see an old article of mine like this posted here. For the people who asked, the site is down because I sold it and the new owner neglected to take care of it :(
Read about the experience here: http://danshipper.com/110636263
Happy to answer questions about it if you have them.
I should have posted this earlier when people were still reading this thread, but Dan Shipper's "Selling Umbrella's in a Synagogue" is really, really relevant to this
http://danshipper.com/selling-umbrellas-in-a-synagogue