Week 25 - Field of Dreams
I've returned from the UK (and wedding season) to Singapore. Gameplan now sits at the precipice of success, we know the product is good, we know it is better than the alternatives, we know what we'd like to do with it in the future. But now we must perform that most arcane of arts (to the developer): marketing.
Our particular struggle is with our marketplace, in the whole it doesn't know that it needs our product. We're not competing against a bloated incumbent, we're competing against wasted hours on spreadsheets. We're not selling to early adopting techies who scour Hacker News for the latest iPhone hotness. We're selling to normal people in love with their sport enough to try the Herculean task of organising sport.
In short to paraphrase Kevin Costner in 'Field of Dreams', if we build it they might not come. So we're experimenting with reaching out to them. I've been cold-emailing various sports leagues, who's details I've been collecting over the last couple of weeks. I've broadly used a template from Peldi's post on marketing. I'm trying to send out over 15 emails every day alongside the 'regular' work I'm doing.
We're also going to hook up with our local startup colleagues myADengine to help us try out some online ads and see if we can drive some traffic that way. We're keen to hear any other ideas or advice anyone might have. Although ideally on a budget, TV ads are a bit beyond our cost!
Our side-project Today's News is close to releasable, we just need to iron out some details with the lovely people at guardian.co.uk and polish the edges. It's looking like our original plans for the app have slightly changed but more on that when we launch. We also know exactly what improvements we're going to make for the next version.
In other news we caught up with Jon from buUuk and traded tales of the Singapore startup scene and got (and hopefully gave) some good advice as well as a good old fashioned gossip.
Next week we're heading to Accelerate 2010, which seems frankly huge and unwieldy as a conference compared to the entrancingly bijou Schnitzelconf. If you're going come find us, we're not exhibiting, but we'll be happily dishing out business cards and opinions and we'll happily demo for anyone! :-)
