Ask HN: Marketing to a Distributed (Niche) Market

1 points by SABmore 14 years ago | 1 comment

I've gone through the process of qualifying a need for SAAS product I'm currently building that targets a niche within the (non-technical) "work from home" market. And while I've gotten great feedback/support from 50 or so folks looking to sign up when we launch, its the other thousands/millions that I want to reach, but am struggling to do so.

The "work from home" market is fragmented, with a few forum sites here and there that I've been able to target, but most won't permit you to post sales/marketing info, and I don't want get our product misconstrued as spam.

I just see that with so few places to go to target a larger audience all in one spot, its going to be difficult and resource intensive to go from 50 to 5000.

Any thoughts/advice is greatly appreciated.

CGherb858 14 years ago |

PR is your best bet and it's pretty easy. I suggest baby steps.

1) Who are your early adopters? Age, sex, location, profession, hobbies, what do they read. Survey monkey and offer a free month or something

2) Choose a segment of your 50.

3) Create a list of blogs, newspapers, magazines to pitch that the segment reads

4) Begin pitching the outlets.

5) Measure the new sign ups per article using google analytics

There's alot of small details in each step but this is the big picture