We've built a great product. Now what?

Previously, I had a post about Google Plus, the great party everyone showed up to, and a minute later went home.
After talking to some entrepreneurs recently, It seems like getting the crowd to take a look at your product is one challenge, and then getting them engaged over a period of time is even more challenging.
So after identifying what the world needs, and how to give the world exactly what it needs, got some feedback from friends, all that's left is bringing people in.
A few tips on doing that without spending on ads and promotion:

(I'll use a flower shop analogy).

- Try to think of one great benefit your potential user (Customer) receives from your product. Formulate that into a strong message. ("We promote flower shops" -> "The best way to promote your flower shop").
- Look for where your potential user hangs out (Online flower shop owners online forum). Stalk it, see how you can begin promoting yourself there.
- Even better - Find out your 'dealer' there (A power user...). Do what you can to lure him: Promise him to be featured for free. Make him get the customers to you.
- Now find 10 of these...

Marketing used to be based on ads, impressions, clicks.
Reliable, engaging marketing is based on opinion makers.

Or, you can do like these guys.

A small rant about Apple

If you have an app or a book published for both Google Play store and the Apple iTunes store, you must know that one as well:
The second you login into the Google Developer console, you see a neat little dashboard, presenting your apps statistics.
With the iTunes connect portal, you need to press two annoying links before you need to wait a couple of seconds and then, hopefully, you get your daily download graph and stats for your app.

This is annoying.

It's amazing how Apple, which stand for design for most people, offer such poor usability for its developers. And don't get me started about XCode.

The X of Y

People which have a hard time defining what their start up does, find it easy to use another start up as a metaphor for what they do:

- "The Groupon of vacations"
- "Like Twitter, but with Video"
- "Like Tumblr, but cooler"

This is something you wouldn't do on your website, right? So why would you introduce yourself like that in person?

Try to come up with what that company does (Go to the "about" in that company's site), and replace that with the company name:

- "Daily deal on the best vacations" (Vacations Groupon)
- "A social video information stream" (Video Twitter)
- "The coolest way to share everything" (Cooler Tumblr)

Still simple, much better.