Hello TweetPilot,

We also started to promote our product before build a single line of code. We started at the same time we started our customers development phase.


Betalist gives you a boost (if you are a B2C) one time. There are similar sites to BetaList (Now I can remember EarlyBirds for example) where you can submit your too. Also there is a resource for SaaS, saasclub, which could featured you in their newsletter.

Those actions are one time only, the other that we are using, is Twitter, following potential customers and posting helpful content for them, give us daily users (we are a B2B, so it's more difficult for us, but still we got some).

Also in our customers development phase, which was done manually, we got many mails in our waiting list.

Good luck with your product!

There are many methods used by many marketers and business people but we have grinded them down into 3 guidelines they usually can be concluded into.

3 Guidelines We Follow:


1) A good reason for people to support you and your product


2) Convert many readers into supporters before launch date and let them test your product


3) Supporters are usually your first few customers, collect their testimonials, edit / improve your product. Find out who are your super affiliates / JVs and share revenue (some prefer barter and some will be really good guys who will help you spread the word about your product launch date. These are your super supporters, treat them nice and well



Launch

Smile
Celebrate a little then continue again...
Keep the momentum

Blogs and being featured on industry news are your best chances of additional boosts beyond BetaList. Some of the fastest growing startups hire a PR firm to grow their awareness and waitlist by getting them an interview with TechCrunch, Forbes and a few other networks before going live. (It also gives a HUGE first impression boost when prospects see that you've been mentioned on some of the trusted news networks)

Not every startup can hire a PR firm and thus you can get traffic through approaching bloggers and asking them to do a review for you. Assuming you have a closed beta, you can get on skype calls with them to share your idea and get their feedback and invite them to write an article for you. Not every blogger is going to say yes so you may want to get a few dozen blogs to approach. Once you get one blogger to write about you, it gets easier to get subsequent bloggers to blog about you.

Other ways to get more traffic is through the forums and online communities your target prospect spends their time. It could be a sub reddit, a niche forum. Try to build some relationship there first before posting your stuff.

Once you have traffic flowing over to you, it is important to ensure you have the best conversion rate on your landing page. Use platforms like Unbounce or Optimizer to test out different background images, headers and subtitles to see how you can get the highest conversion.

I will tell you exactly how we did it.


Firstly we set up a coming soon page, explained a bit about what we do but kept the core fundamental information of what we did a secret. This was a balance between creating curiosity, protecting our idea and telling people how we solve their problem.


We used aggressive social media to get our first members. Started to capture emails, in a few weeks we had hundreds of people on our mailing list, we kept them updated on developments, which makes them care about what you are creating and also helps to keep you on their radar and not to forget about you.


We then had a basic working product and set up betakeys for people to signup and test the site. We had a couple of business's we had spoken to on warrior forum who agreed to be the first few people to submit on our site and afterwards we gave out betakeys to everyone else on the mailing list.


We soon made our first mistake and realised that betakeys were a mistake, we soon had a quiet launch of the site and opened it up to the public. The slow launch consisted of firstly stopping betakey restrictions and having a link saying to access the site at /preview then we moved the main site to our root domain after a week. Its good sometimes to not have an official launch but a soft quiet launch can be a lot better and less stressful, also if its slower than you expected no one notices.


Then we submitted our site to various places, we are good friends with startuplister and betabound but there are loads more. There are some great lists out their of places to post your startup promotehour is also good.