Ask YC: Providing Incentives to Evangelists

[bharath]

We are a seed stage startup (havent raised money) in the bootstrapping phase. So far, we have relied exclusively on writing to/contacting individual members of the target community to get them on board our website. Now we feel like we have enough content/activity to take our marketing efforts to the next level and are thinking in terms of recruiting a team of evangelists. These people will be well known members of the target community who will generate "buzz" by blogging about us, pro-actively help us acquire users and try to contribute towards greater levels of activity on our website.

A real world comparison would be the paid reviewers that Yelp used. The emphasis on evangelists draws from the fact that the target market is India where viral marketing has not been a factor in Web success stories so far.

What would be the way(s) to compensate these guys? Equity is the most obvious choice. If so how much? Are there other ways?

[froo]

It really depends on the niche that you're targeting.

For example, I know of an online store that sells wine but they sold wines that came from a fairly specific region - when they started marketing their site, they sent free bottles of wine to various wine blogs and reviewers, with a very simple "With Compliments" card.

They didn't ask to be reviewed, but ended up being reviewed favourably anyway, and garnered a decent amount of traffic.

Anyway, the point of the story is that if you are targeting people who are passionate about a specific area of interest, you can often get away with giving something that has more than a monetary value as long as you are being creative.

At least thats my opinion.