[paulsingh]

Not sure if you're bring sarcastic, but I'll bite.

Yes, but you need to peel off a specific problem within a given vertical. I bootstrapped both of these ideas and, because of the limitations that come with bootstrapping, I targeted them specifically.

MailFinch is on demand direct mail for real estate agents. Over time, companies that send a lot of invoices started using it too.

NotaryCRM is for notaries - plain and simple. Over time, it became apparent that signing companies were also looking for a solution that solved their specific pains.

[parbo]

I was a little bit of both. Thanks for the extra info!

[sabat]

Paul -- would love to hear a summary of what you did to market these sites. SEO? Direct marketing? Word of mouth? Online ads? What was your approach, and what did you learn?

Edit: I suppose one could read this post: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/distribution-distribution...

[paulsingh]

Happy to share... I think I'll write an entire blog post on this.

MailFinch: Cold calls and asking for referrals. NotaryCRM: lots of SEO (notice the "find a notary" directory and the theme of almost all of the blog posts)

For both, there was a lot of call-to-action testing (in terms of verbal calls to action during my phone/in-person conversations) and rapid iteration (breaking features down into the smallest chunks and deploying often).

More recently (like, a week ago) I built a really basic site to force myself to learn a little more about consumer-focused community building.

As with all of my ideas, making money comes a close second behind the most important thing to me: learning something new.