"This feels a little like meaningless link bait till then". Spot on.
When I saw the title of the article I assumed that they already got the 10,000 sign ups and were explaining how did they manage to do it.
As I was reading through their list I was getting more and more skeptical. Some of their points make sense, others, simply don't ring true.
I then checked their Twitter account and saw that they had (at the time of writing) 93 followers. Really? 93? Not that I think that Twitter followers is the most useful metric as a measure of interest in a web-app (or that Twitter is really useful as a marketing tool for that matter) but for people that claim to be riding the waves of the viral marketing and that seem to put a lot of value and effort into increasing their Twitter and FB numbers, 93 followers sure looks a little low.
I had to come back to the comments in HN and to read carefully the title of the submission again to realize that they don't actually claim to have the 10,000 followers yet. Only that they want to reach that number. And they hope that the steps outlined in the article will help them to get there.
This misunderstanding may well be because English is not my first language, but even so, it still smells like link bait to me. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone around here will have his own opinion on how to get 10,000 sign ups. Until that opinion has been proven to work in real life, it's still a hunch, not all that useful.
Agreed. The marketing (blog text) was impressive. But you lost about 90% credibility by having essentially 0 followers on twitter. For a site of such broad appeal, you should be way higher than that.
It's doesn't match the air of authority you project on social media tactics.
Making it to difficult to join, will stop to success of this. There is a border interested customers won't cross and making them to beg hard probably is that border.
It's not that we want to make it hard to join the beta, it's that we want to reward the people who promote us to others. Everyone who gives us their e-mail address gets in early. Those who help us out get in earlier.
I promise to do a post-mortem, success or failure.
Twitter followers: 77 Facebook followers: 75
Their tactic of making it really difficult to join the beta doesn't seem to be working so far, but he didn't say how long they've been doing this.
Be interesting to see if they get to a good number in beta. This feels a little like meaningless link bait till then.
Please post again in a few months time with how this worked out!