Noah Kagan

Ok, here is a concrete example of a communication style that I'm talking about.

I wrote:
"Hmm, I also think you need a new name. 'Showoff' says exactly what it does, lets you 'showoff' your work. What's a pagekite? (reminds of the 'mint' vs that unpronouncablely named finance site naming issue)."

That is feedback from a potential customer that I, as the customer, don't get any sense of what your product is about from the name. I cite by inference a great postmortem written up about the 'Mint' startup, and had you searched for 'mint postmortem' you could have come up with the link [1] below. The alternative to Mint was a website called Wesabe. Both Mint and Wesabe did personal finance, Wesabe was in some ways technically 'superior' to Mint and yet Mint "won."

So you have this bit of feedback on how the name you've chosen isn't helping your product get any visibility and you respond like this:

"Regarding the name, I actually think PageKite is an excellent name and we are lucky to have it. It's googlable, we got the .com for cheap, it's a strong trademark. If I draw you a picture of your site flying like a kite in the clouds, connected by a string to your laptop, you'll find the name is a perfect fit... :-)"

You tell me, your potential customer, that I am wrong in thinking your name doesn't tell me what I need to know about your site. And you go on to tell me how all it would take would be some graphic, which you don't have time to draw right now, of a kite made out of a…

My feedback:
1) You could narrow down needs. Imagine how hiring a "tech person" to build a cloud service is too broad.

2) Read about marketing people with technical skills to understand what they do. Decent but dated example:
http://okdork.com/2010/10/14/how-mint-beat-wesabe/
Many other examples blur lines too (patio11, SEOMoz, etc)

3) Couldn't tell if they had investors but that might be a source too. As hackers can find hackers, I bet investors can find marketers.

4) Find a successful competitor who filled the position. Write a job description based on that person's bio.

5) Consider trying out a contractor or consultant first. If having that person in the office would destroy culture, maybe you don't need them.

Forget coding your own landing page and try these services.

http://www.unbounce.com and
http://www.instapaper.com are paid

http://www.launchrock.com is free

Spend all your time optimising the landing page and getting traffic to it, rather than coding one up.

Read these for landing page optimisation

http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-landing-page/

and

http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-landing-page/

If you're a consumer product then well-targeted facebook ads can drive strong traffic.

http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-facebook/

!!Make sure you get the users email address on your landing page!!

Here are some best practices I follow:
- Post regularly, so every Tuesday, or every Tues/Fri
- Make a content calendar for planning
- If you link to people or companies let them know,
as long as it is valuable they will share the content
- Tweet our your articles. Maybe invest in a small campaign

Here are some blogs to read to get you started:

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/

http://okdork.com/blog/

I am not trying to be rude, but MS has a lot of useful templates: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/results.aspx?qu=startup&ex=1&av=zxl

Also google: https://drive.google.com/templates?q=startup&category=2&sort=hottest&view=public

This looks good?

https://drive.google.com/previewtemplate?id=0AuTYwDzB4XSudEJZZmJOZ2x1VGM2cnNrTG9DUGlobUE&mode=public

related: http://okdork.com/2010/07/15/quant-based-marketing-for-pre-launch-start-ups/