If you run a startup, even a 'exchange goods and services with customers' lifestyle company like I have that ignores investors completely, you will need to market yourself. If your customers are other startups, news.ycombinator.com is an excellent place to market yourself.
Yes, writing about your activities is marketing yourself. Until you become much bigger than I am, a 'personal relationship' with your customers is a huge part of marketing.
Hah. I was going to link to some old twitter threads, but it seems 'older tweets are not available'... I search for my company name on twitter quite a lot, and help people who are complaining. I'm remembering a particularly amusing moment when one of my Chinese customers was complaining (in Chinese) of a down VPS. I used the google translate tool to figure out what they were complaining about, then I helped them with the problem. The customer was rather shocked that I was able to puzzle out the problem from the Chinese description.
One of the keys to marketing, though, is to not spend too much time on any one prospect until you know they are interested. It sounds like you feel the need to put a lot of effort into marketing yourself to PG before he has shown much interest. In the example above, because the conversation was on twitter, I was not only helping one customer, I was telling the world that I'm the sort of guy who is willing and able to help out my customers.
If your customers are on news.ycombinator.com (or if you are primarily marketing your startup to investors rather than to customers, which I personally think is bad) then yeah, put effort into building your image here. Otherwise, it probably is not worth the effort, unless you really enjoy it.
Uh, that's the other thing. Yeah, you could say that we are all building images of ourselves. But you know? people are pretty good at sniffing out fakes. If you want your image to feel genuine, you need it to be genuine.
Yes, writing about your activities is marketing yourself. Until you become much bigger than I am, a 'personal relationship' with your customers is a huge part of marketing.
Hah. I was going to link to some old twitter threads, but it seems 'older tweets are not available'... I search for my company name on twitter quite a lot, and help people who are complaining. I'm remembering a particularly amusing moment when one of my Chinese customers was complaining (in Chinese) of a down VPS. I used the google translate tool to figure out what they were complaining about, then I helped them with the problem. The customer was rather shocked that I was able to puzzle out the problem from the Chinese description.
One of the keys to marketing, though, is to not spend too much time on any one prospect until you know they are interested. It sounds like you feel the need to put a lot of effort into marketing yourself to PG before he has shown much interest. In the example above, because the conversation was on twitter, I was not only helping one customer, I was telling the world that I'm the sort of guy who is willing and able to help out my customers.
If your customers are on news.ycombinator.com (or if you are primarily marketing your startup to investors rather than to customers, which I personally think is bad) then yeah, put effort into building your image here. Otherwise, it probably is not worth the effort, unless you really enjoy it.
Uh, that's the other thing. Yeah, you could say that we are all building images of ourselves. But you know? people are pretty good at sniffing out fakes. If you want your image to feel genuine, you need it to be genuine.