Marketing to 53,651 might not be a bad idea after all

A few weeks a go Josh Kopelman wrote a really popular post on his blog that expressed his concerns about web 2.0 entrepreneurs marketing to too small of an audience.

”A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly. However, I’d strongly caution entrepreneurs from taking their initial consumer adoption metrics and extrapolating them too far into the future. I believe startups will find it difficult to cross the “Techcrunch chasm” between the Web 2.0 geeks and Mainstreet USA.“

Techcrunch has over 50k readers and he thinks that those 50k + readers are not a “mainstream America audience”. Well, he’s partially right. Those 50k + readers are not your typical casual internet user. That audience, is what I would call, power internet users and early adopters. They are the people who can make or break a product. They are also the best beta test audience, for several reasons, mostly because they are willing to give quality feedback. But, the most important attribute of that groups is that they are influencers. That makes them a very important group of people to market to. If you’re building a new web product or service, that potentially, will have “main stream” appeal, but you don’t have a budget to “blow it out” from the beginning. Then, why not market to that Techcrunch group for a lot less dollars. If you have a good product, they will evangelize for you. If your product is not so good they’ll tell you that also. Either way, I think the best way to launch your new web product is to market to that group of 50k + users. They will add value to your product or service.

technorati tags: marketing, startup, techcrunch, redeyevc, joshkopelman