Holy crap. There is just so much wrong and arrogant in this piece that I don’t know where to start. She talks about all of the users her company got; how many of them are paying customers? Depending on your business, it’s easy to get a bunch of “users,” but it’s very hard to get a bunch of paying users. If my product were free, I would have tens of thousands of users, (my niche is pretty narrow, a TAM of 200k people in the US and about 3 million worldwide.) But those users are worth exactly nothing if you can’t convince them to pay. So I am not impressed with squirting a bunch of free users — if you have 5 million free users, maybe then I would be impressed, but anything less than that, unless it’s a paid product, they’re actually costing you a whole lot more than they are worth. Unless you are ad-supported, but even then, less than 5 million isn’t at all impressive (to me.)

I tried the hanging up fliers bit 6 years ago. I also tried to build thought leadership and similar nonsense. For my little company, we are just now getting high rankings in Google for relevant keywords, but that took literally years of relentless blogging on highly focused quality content directed specifically at our potential customers. As far as product hunt? I can guarantee you not a single customer of mine has ever heard about Product Hunt let alone used it to find solutions to their problems. My business deals with mental health practitioners and they sure as hell aren’t looking for our solution on product hunt. The author mentions startup directories. That’s about as dumb as expecting a Tech Crunch article to get you customers. Our customers don’t read Tech Crunch. Most potential customers of products don’t read it either. We were even featured in a Wired Magazine feature in 2012 and that didn’t get us customers either because our customers don’t read Wired or, if they do, it isn’t much. We literally got more leads from a Readers Digest mention than from Wired. We were in a Forbes article about top health startups and years later, we still get leads from that. But counting on that as a customer acquisition channel? That’d be crazy. As far as getting friendly with bloggers — that could help except all the bloggers that matter are already friendly with the competition as well. And, in the mental health practitioner space, there aren’t a great many bloggers that actually have an audience. You know what does work? Content marketing and paid search. Paid ads on industry organization websites work very well too. Professional conferences work to some extent as well. But paid search (not just on Google, but sites like Capterra) works extremely well, especially if you are clever with the long tail.

If you are making some kind of trendy toy for the technorati or a non-specific audience of “the general public,” then perhaps some of her tactics might work, but for reaching actual people in your niche that are willing to pay, content marketing, paid search and paid ads in industry-relevant places work far better than some high school student council election style promotion. I intend to be harsh because in the 9 years I’ve been running this business, almost everything she says is wrong (at least in my anecdotal case.) Paid ads absolutely work, but like anything else, you have to be smart and disciplined. Paid ads can just as easily be a money pit, but if you know anything at all about your customers and your product is worth something, you should be able to find success with initial customers using paid advertising (and not just online.) If I were to raise another funding round, I’d devote almost all of it to content marketing and paid ads because they absolutely work. It costs us about $200 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $750. There is a direct correlation for us with ad spend and customer acquisition. It’s just mathematics at this point. Figuring out the product-market fit and knowing your customer extremely well — those are the hard parts. Once you figure that out, the rest is just about executing and measuring.