When Should I Start Promoting My Startup?

I had a great question from a founder yesterday: "We're not launching until next month. Is it too early to start promoting the product now?'

Yes and no.

Firstly, before you do any promotion, you need to a dummy-run with friends and family: http://bit.ly/r9k5ql. This will iron out any embarasing wrinkles like spelling mistakes and 404 pages etc.

And secondly, it really depends on the level of promotion you're talking about. If your PR firm is trying to talk you into doing a national marketing campaign when your product is only in beta, they don't really care about you or your company. Spending hundreds or thousands on a press campaign to attract customers when you don't have enough dev resource to fix bugs does not send a good message.

Instead, I tell startups to do "underground marketing". Underground marketing & PR (in the TechFluff & Co office, at least) is all about finding the die-hards in your target market (for example, if you're launching a fitness site, the die-hards would be gym bunnies pumping iron 7 days a week) and building relationships with them. These are people who will have the most valuable feedback to give. They're also your earliest salespeople. Manage their expectations and make them feel special. Let them know that they're the experts. You want their feedback. You want to know how to make the product experience better for them. This turns them into evangelists. They'll tell their friends all about your product. Their enthusiasm will convert their friends into using it. Then they'll tell their friends. And word will spread.

It's all about managing and nurturing your community of users. At a time when the product isn't perfect, you've got to give them alot of love. They'll repay you through word of mouth. Turntable FM is a classic example. The product (I hear) is buggy and not ready to hit the mainstream market just yet so it's in invite-only beta at the moment . But they've spent alot of time identifying and building relationships with early users. And those guys are buzzing about it. They overlook all the crashes and fixes. They are so excited because they believe in it. And they're getting the rest of us excited about the public release.

So to answer the founder's question: don't market to the public. Market to the underground.