beta list - i don't think helps that much. the founder told me himself not to bump up servers for him bc it'll come over 3 days and first day not that much.. le

beta list - i don't think helps that much. the founder told me himself not to bump up servers for him bc it'll come over 3 days and first day not that much.. less than 80 so far but i guess there still is an email blast coming. there's also publications that's specific for local lifestyle magazines that's more relevant for me. for example, chicago mag is part of modern luxury and they have l.a. ny miami "mags" etc... you can pay to have it blasted to their user base which is a double opt-in newsletter subscription (risky move that worked for us bc its so targeted - chicks that like lifestyle sht). what i did was get that blasted to approximately 150,000 people (60,000 in chicago) with majority of reader base residing in la, ny, chicago. their average click through rate is 2-4%. the email ad was cleverly designed with a shopping giveaway so when people click through they come to the landing page and then the viral coefficient kicks in to get their friends to also register to get notified when we launch. if i had to do it again i think one can optimize the sht out of this to make it so much better. my was a half-hack job but still worked great. also our current landing page was optimally designed so that it would naturally get good upvotes on stumbleupon. we had 3k people per month hitting our site via stumbleupon. reppio being a social commerce player can leverage off of other social commerce sites pushing to svpply and even tumblr to get users baited with pictures and then come to the landing page to give us email addresses. all of those combined plus on the ground and various other tactics led to a significant amount of email addresses ahead of launch. that set we started to blast. maybe i was premature in saying that techcrunch/tech sources wouldn't be that relevant since there are writers who write in this space and we did hundreds of hours of work on this but to no avail (we also didn't want to hire a pr person to run this and in hindsight i don't think i know pr that well). however, i didn't want to leave it to chance and so i hedged all positions for launch. now i'm sure the real hard work begins in trying to find product market fit / see how i can get re-engagement up from my core set of users. i'm in the business of engagement; that is the single most important variable for my business. just ask that chick who cut a check to pinterest very early on even thought they had a couple thousand users. this is why i'm going to HN to get feedback from a variety of people. i know that my demographic will be geared toward women. that's natural way for my business to shift focus. but there is a player who has succeeded in balancing a 60/40 split in user base in the lifestyle category. and asking men who probably don't like shopping and seeing if there is any way i can make it cool for you guys to want to engage with my site was the goal of this post.