Suppose you’re an internet startup, you’ve built a prototype, managed to get people to visit your site and some of them have signed up. How can you create more visibility to scale up your user base by a factor of 10 or 100? You can’t just do the same things harder, you need some different tactics.

But first, revisit what you’ve done and make sure that it’s kept pace with your adaptations of your product. Do your website, demo video, and any other promotional material you’ve got out there still describe what you’re doing now? Do they address what your target market cares about? If not, make any adjustments that are necessary to bring them into alignment. Once that’s done, here are some ways you can turn up the volume.

Of course applying to a mentor-based accelerator (like StartFast!) is a great way to get noticed. The folks running the accelerator have an extensive network of contacts and will help you get noticed whether you get in or not. If you do get in, you will get all the visibility you could hope for, as these programs and their mentors are nationally and internationally renowned. Here are some other useful techniques for building awareness and your user base.

Natural Friends

Natural friends are groups of people that should like you and your product. If you haven’t already done so, create a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, a blog and a Twitter feed for your company/product/service. Then search for individuals and groups that attract an audience you’re interested in. Join the group, follow the individuals and become an active participant tweeting and commenting regularly. Try to add value; don’t just pitch your product. Create a YouTube and/or Vimeo channel and post your demo video there. There are large communities of people you can plug into this way.

Don’t forget old-fashioned list-serves/bulletin boards and trade associations. These are great ways to reach people in your market if you’re not too salesy in your approach. Offer promo keys / discount codes to the first 100 members that sign up. Be generous with beta[1] access. These are the people who are going to help promote your business. Running a contest and inviting users to a launch party are two of my other favorite ways of creating additional buzz. Be creative, but stay within your budget!

Advertising

Getting results with paid Adwords and Facebook accounts can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. By all means experiment and if you are getting results  continue and expand your budget somewhat. However, if you haven’t cracked the code with paid advertising, then put this technique on the shelf for now. TV and radio spots are too expensive but sponsoring a podcast, vlog, or internet bulletin board may be within your budget. If there are specific groups that you can reach this way, ask the publisher about sponsorship opportunities. Craigslist is free and popular so put an ad for your solution there. DMOZ.com, the open directory project, is another free resource. Also check out BOTW.com (Best of the Web) which is not free, but still relatively cheap. There may be other sites specific to your target market that could be helpful to you and many offer basic listings for free. For example, in the content space, creativecow.com and behance.net offer a free listing.

Trade Shows

Trade shows can also be an inexpensive way to get the word out if you use a little guerrilla marketing. Check the upcoming tradeshows in your area and see if you can get an “Exhibits Only” pass for free. More and more tradeshows are offering these to increase the perceived booth traffic. Bring your application with you on your phone, tablet or laptop, along with some postcards with a screen shot and your value proposition along with a QR code (two-dimensional bar codes that can be interpreted by a mobile phone camera equipped with a code-reading app) pointing to your web address. As you walk around the tradeshow, ask people if they’d like a free demo or beta access to your solution. People love free stuff. You might pick up a hundred new users in an afternoon if the tradeshow caters to people in your target market. Get a QR code for your website or app store entry. Websites qrcode.kaywa.com, Qurify.com/en, Delivr.com/qr-code-generator, and Goo.gl will convert a standard URL into a Quick Response (QR) code. Once converted, you can download the QR image file and then attach it to your e-mail signature, upload it as a Facebook profile photo, print it on the back of your business card or post it anywhere you want.

Another way to gain free access to trade shows is by joining a partner in the booth that they’re paying for. Have the partner add you to their exhibit staff and you’ll get in for free. This has the advantage that you can set up meetings ahead of time and have your prospects meet you at your partner’s booth. Friendly tradeshow staff will guide your prospect to your location. And while you’re waiting, you can try out your elevator pitch on everyone that comes to the booth. Why would your partner do this for you? Maybe your app utilizes their cloud computing platform, plug-in or framework. So promoting your app promotes their solution too.

You will get invited to trade show parties by other vendors. These are business/social events so it is expected that you’re going to tell people about what you do. Go, have a good time and be prepared to hand out your postcards and talk about your app. Be respectful of the fact that the party host is paying for the event and don’t disrupt their marketing mission.

Trade association professional meetings and other industry events will often put out requests for volunteers to help out with the meeting. By volunteering some of your time, you’ll get to attend the entire conference. Don’t pitch during the sessions, as these are purely educational. However, during the breaks and meals, everyone you meet will ask, “What do you do?” That’s your cue to tell them how you and your startup are going to change the world and their lives.  If they’re interested, offer them access and ask them to invite their friends or blog about their experience.

Press

Now that you have a prototype to put in the hands of editors and bloggers, you have a chance to get noticed. Make sure your demo video is up to snuff before you start and that your site is ready for a couple thousand new users. Put up a Press page on your website where anyone can download for free a high-res version of your logo or icon, screen shots, founders’ bios, and 50, 100, and 300 word descriptions of your company, value proposition and product or service. You’ll be surprised how much traction you get just by making it easy on the media.

So how do you get covered by the bright lights in the blogosphere like TechCrunch, Digg, GigaOm, VentureBeat, Wired, TUAW, New and Noteworthy, LifeHacker or other opinion leaders? Perhaps there are publications that are even more specific to your market that you’d like to get coverage in. Here is how you get your product or service noticed and hopefully written about in someone else’s blog:

1. Read the blogs you want to appear in to get an idea what the authors like to write about, their style and how they like to tell a story. Try to understand their worldview.
2. Comment on the blogger’s posts. Give some thought to the comments you make and don’t pitch your product. The idea is to become someone the blogger knows and respects. Believe me, they read your comments. Next start tweeting the blogger’s posts out to your network, or use LinkedIn or Facebook if that is more your style. Link to their blog from yours. If you meet socially, spare them your elevator pitch. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but there is a point. You are making deposits in the relationship bank with that blogger. You will earn interest on those deposits later.
3. Draft your own story, to the best of your ability, in your chosen author’s voice and style. The better (interesting, engaging, concise) the story, the more likely someone will want to tell it. Make sure there’s some drama in the headline, and make sure you are truthful. You could refer to a large company missing the boat ala, “The opportunity Facebook missed,” or how fast your company is growing, or the big customer you just won (get their permission first). Tie into trends that your targeted blogger has written about.
4. So what? As you read your story, ask yourself, “So what?” over and over until you’ve rewritten the story into something that matters or means something. Example: “We’re launching a new social gaming site.” So what? Get specific. Change that to “Our users are tired of social gaming with bad graphics. We’re upgrading the user experience to the level of a game console so users can really get immersed.”
5. Get rid of all the buzzwords like “killer”, “next big thing”, “new new thing” and clichés like “insanely good,” “radically better,” and certainly “the best thing since X.” Pop culture references are OK if they’re not too obscure[2].
6. Make comparisons. Most people understand things more quickly when you can compare them to something they already know, and tell them what the differences are. For example, “MediaCloud is like DropBox for content professionals. It makes use of distributed cloud processors to accelerate uploads and downloads of big media files and takes advantage of HTML5 to provide a rich set of tools to view and manipulate all kinds of graphic and video content.”
7. Include a list of your competitors and what makes you different.
8. Get covered. Once you’ve done 1-7 above, there are two ways to get your company mentioned.
   1. Use the site or publication’s formal submission process, which is usually easy to find on the website. For example, for Techcrunch fill out the form at http://techcrunch.com/contact/, or
   2. Email the blogger, author, or editor directly.

You can increase your chances of your story getting picked up by giving the blogger of your choice an exclusive on your story, along with credentials to use your prototype. Always give free access in exchange for coverage. When you do get press, tweet it out, post it to Facebook and update your LinkedIn status with it.

2012 is shaping up to be a great year for our entrepreneurs with lots of events to attend and successes to celebrate.

EXITS:  Hot on the heels of recent exits for Sensis (Syracuse), Kionix (Ithaca), and Paetec (Rochester), Buffalo-based Synacor debuted on the NASDAQ this past week, creating liquidity for two of the region’s early stage investors: Rand Capital and Advantage Capital.

FINANCINGS:  The Seed Capital Fund of CNY (a StartFast investor) reports that four portfolio companies are expected to close about $7MM in new funding this quarter.  In addition to SCF, participating investors include Cayuga Venture Fund, Rand Capital, Eastern NY Angels and several out of state angels/VCs.

STARTUP WEEKENDS:  Last November’s sold out events in Ithaca and Syracuse showed just how much talent is locked up in our region and the many serial entrepreneurs who are ready to mentor a new generation of startups.  This year promises at least four to six more such events, beginning with Albany in March and Rochester in April.

MEETUPS: Just a year after its launch, the Syracuse Tech Meetup group continues to grow in size and popularity, drawing hundreds of attendees.  The next meetup is February 28 and offers startups a chance to meet organizers and mentors from the StartFast and Student Sandbox accelerators.

Subscribe to the Upstate Venture Connect calendar via RSS to stay in the loop on future events.

by Chuck Stormon

What a month January 2012 was! I started Jan. 2 by publishing Start Fast!, then flew off to Vegas to speak on Content in the Cloud at CES (4 minute video review of some of the coolest stuff from CES 2012), then launched the StartFast Venture Accelerator (we opened Applications on January 17), and then launched a new SaaS called MediaCloud with simultaneous demos at the NY Video Meetup and the Sundance Film Festival on January 26. This is the first time I’ve had a few moments to put my thoughts down on what I think will be hot startup opportunities in 2012 for software, mobile and internet ventures.

1.  Advertising gets personal and startups that capitalize on this will do well in 2012 – “Consumers are generating everything from their own entertainment to their own advertising (and often they are one in the same). All these messages are highly personal, driven by the passion of individuals. More than ever, the personal side of ad:tech is about marketing for the people, by the people – and what role professional marketers have to play in this”. –  Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy Public Relations
2. HD is the new SD -  With my super-thin wall mounted Samsung 55″ LED TV, I can’t stand to watch the “fuzzy channels” as my wife and I call anything that is not 1080p. Well that was so last year! My freaking iPhone shoots 1080p.  4K is the new 1080p. Cameras for shooting 4K are available for $5,000, which is within the reach of just about anyone who wants one. Software and SaaS applications for processing, transcoding, rendering, colorizing, storing, sharing, streaming, monetizing and just about anything else you can do with 4K video are going to be hot in the years to come. If you’re wondering where you can play that content, there’s already an 8K TV.
   
3. Siri is just the beginning. We’ve entered the era of using our voice, hands, eyes – heck our whole bodies as input devices. Keyboard, mouse, touch-screens are already “quaint” (Hello Computer). Every application under the sun is a candidate for retooling with voice, gestural, and other new input methods ala Oblong (Brad Feld’s post on this one)
4. Flash is dead. Long live HTML5! I’m a fan of HTML5. Works like an App but it’s in a browser. I hate Flash and I’m not the only one who does. It can’t die soon enough for me (sorry YouTube). There are too many startup opportunities here to enumerate (some mobile app opps). A big exit announced today.
5. 3D Gaming. We’ve all been subjected to an effluvium of bad 3D movies. Those glasses give me a headache. Well say goodbye to the glasses with new 4K 3D TVs. Immersive 3D gaming experiences are coming to smartphones and other handheld devices as well.Opportunities and challenges for startups abound.
6. Please make my TV work again! Back in the day, before advanced tech, my TV worked great. I turned it on and flipped the channels until I found what I wanted. Why do Smart TVs suck so bad? Will startups fix the current horrific SmartTV user experience?
7. Yes, yes. Social + mobile. Facebook’s IPO will open even more opportunities for the Instagram’s, FourSquare’s and Yelp’s of the future. Startup opportunities abound. Event in San Fran next week.
8. Apps in the real world. Sensors (like accelerometers; GPS receivers; cameras; RFIDs; temperature sensors, bar-code readers and more) are everywhere and give applications a way to know automatically what’s going on in the real world and with users. Crunching, mining and monetizing this data is a huge opportunity for startups.
9. Social games. We’re still at the beginning of this powerful trend. Who knew we like to play with others? And social + mobile + games? Yikes. Better games please (19 minute Social Games that don’t suck video).
10. The one nobody thought of. Except if you think of it, and make a startup success, then next year everyone can copy you! But be sure that you’re not the copy-cat. Here’s some practical advice. Here are a bunch someone already thought of. Here’s some market research.

Well I guess my New Year’s resolution about not writing trite top-ten-list blogs just went out the window. Cheers!

By Nasir

In the 10 or so days that our website has been open for applications, the most frequently asked question is: What do you look for in your first screen of applications?

Answer. The first things we look for are: idea quality; team capability; and founder commitment

Idea quality:  StartFast has assembled an amazing group of mentors and our funding comes from private investors who are seeking high growth opportunities.  Both groups are making the commitment believing that their money and time will be well spent.  Ideas that are unlikely to inspire the interest of our mentors are also unlikely to be successful in getting follow-on investor interest and/or customer adoption.  We are looking for ideas that have the potential to create disruptive change and unlock significant economic opportunities. Period.

Team capability:  StartFast is a three month program and expectations of founding teams are high.  We expect teams to build a product, validate with users, and repeat until they get it right.  At the same time, they will have to create a business model, test with customers, tweak or pivot until they get it right.  For starters, it is more than a one-person job.  Our mentors will provide lots of suggestions and feedback, and we will have specialists available to help with specific design or coding tasks.  However, the core team should have the technical ability and business confidence to execute successfully on both the product and business tracks.  The best way for us to gauge whether teams can perform is if they apply early, then provide ongoing updates during the application period to reinforce their superiority with concrete achievements.

Founder commitment:  Last, but not least, our expectation is that founders applying to StartFast work on the startup full-time.  This may be the only non-negotiable requirement and stems from our experience as seed investors.  Our expectation is that teams will be in Syracuse for the duration of the program, but we do not have any constraints on where you take the business after graduation.

One hundred days to get focused, get feedback, and get funded. We’ll give you enough money to pursue your software/internet startup full-time, co-working space, resources to work with, and continuous feedback on your progress from mentors who’ve done it before.  Post-program, our mission is to help you get the funding and resources needed to scale and achieve a successful exit.  Apply Now for this summer’s program or contact us to be a StartFast mentor, sponsor, investor or volunteer.

We’re not just another accelerator.  Besides world class mentors and program leaders, StartFast offers:

• Access to high quality, affordable talent for your startup;
• Ability to achieve your goals not just faster, but with an ultra low burn rate;
• Our successful track record of getting companies funded;
• Support from an emerging, globally connected entrepreneurial community;
• There is no catch!  Our funding is entirely from private sources and there is no post-program residency requirement to limit your options.