What are the best ways for first time entrepreneurs to get word out about a startup?

Getting people or businesses to try a new product can be really hard, but if you’re persistent and solving a pressing pain point or providing a valuable new experience (like Strava), you can get some people to try it. I have experience marketing both B2B and B2C software products at an early stage, and here are some free marketing tactics that I’ve seen work well.

Leverage your network

If you’ve just launched your product or even if you’re still building it, ask your family, friends and friends of friends to try it out. When your product is new, most people are going to care less about it, but people who you know are much more likely to care that you’ve built something and be willing to try it.

When your family and friends do try your product, you should badger them for feedback. While you can learn about some glaring holes in what you’ve built by talking to your closer connections, it’s also important to note that they might not completely shoot you straight. Still, they will help you move in the right direction and might tell other people about your product if they really like it.

Convincing your network to use your app is not a viable way to scale user growth but that shouldn’t be a concern when you’re just starting out. If you haven’t read “Do things that don’t scale” by Paul Graham, I highly recommend doing so. It will help you to better understand that getting (and retaining) your early users will likely take a lot of manual effort.

Cold emails

If you have a B2B product, you should think about sending cold emails to people in your target industry. Don’t worry about writing long, descriptive emails; just make them short and sweet. If the person is really suffering from the problem your solution solves, your message might resonate with them and they may try your solution out. In general, email is still an effective marketing channel, because you know that people have to check their inbox on a regular basis.

People tend to associate content marketing with blogging but there are many other forms of content such as podcasts, videos, white papers, case studies and infographics.

Content marketing

Another option for getting the word out is content marketing. People tend to associate content marketing with blogging but there are many other forms of content such as podcasts, videos, white papers, case studies and infographics. There is an abundance of content being created on the web every day, so you’ll really need to get creative with your content marketing strategy.

Struggling to decide what type of content you should create and what you should say? Think about what knowledge you can offer people that is unique and insightful. For example, I worked at an early stage jobs marketplace startup, and we had built a data ingestion engine that processed key data points about companies like headcount growth, what schools they typically hire from and funding information. We used this data to write blog posts that ended up getting thousands of reads.

Once we launched our app, we saw we were getting lots of signups from computer science students that were interested in working in the tech industry. After seeing this data, we shaped our content strategy around this insight and wrote about things our potential and existing users actually cared about. Below is an image from a blog post we published titled, “Where will future tech superstars come from?”

Other ideas for getting the word out:

• Attend a trade show
• Attend local meetups
• Participate in online communities

YC recently published their “Essential Startup Advice” which has some really helpful advice about how startups get users/customers and just startups in general.

Additionally, here’s my Quora answer to the question “How can I generate website traffic with $0 marketing budget?”

Originally published at www.quora.com.