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• It is becoming clear to me from Martin's success and Pieter Levels' success and the success of Tom Francis that it is very advantageous to have a following of people who will be interested in your products when you release them. They will be your first customers, they will form the crucial early community, and they will tell their friends and help create vitalitysome virality.

Articles / videos on how building a following helped someone succeed

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Kan

Richard Branson has repeatedly used publicity stunts to raise awareness of businesses he was starting.

Build up your social presence: have lots of people know who you are.

Make / do something cool / controversial

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• Larry/Sergey met the VCs that funded them through their Stanford professors, who knew VCs
• Larry/Sergey found their first real office (a garage and bottom floor of a house) because Sergey had dated the house owner's roommate at Stanford Business School
• 2013.10.25 - Dan Siroker at Startup School 2013
  • A good strategy that Google has for distribution is to put the word "Google" in front of the products they build, and by doing that you end up getting about 100,000 people trying your product right off the bat [NW: Just like Tom Francis with Gunpoint: he had people following his blog who helped spread the news of his game.]. That was very valuable, not only because if the product was any good, you'd grow much faster and be successful, but because of the feedback that those people would provide as you're incrementally improving the product [NW: Again, this is just what happened with Tom Francis and Gunpoint: the people following his blog gave him advice for what to improve.]. And this was the biggest lesson that I learned while I was at Google as a product manager, is the value of a feedback loop. This is the one critical thing I was missing at Sentiment Solutions, because I didn't have any customers to tell me what they liked or didn't like; I didn't even try to sell the product so I had no idea what I actually should be building.

If your product is for a wide audience, use publicity stunts to get widespread attention.

• Richard Branson did this
• Uber did this (ice cream delivery, kitten delivery, Delorean, helicopter rides, etc.) Not everything they tried would be practical but the point is to get people talking about the company.
  
  

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