[RobIsIT]

How much effort is coverage in a major tech blog worth?

Thinking about Moore's Chasam, doesn't coverage in a major tech blog encourage more early adopters that will consume the few startup resources you have before they move on to the next startup covered?

Or...

Is coverage worth it? Do a shockingly strong percentage of early adopters reliably become paying customers or engaged users?

I know the answer to this will be subjective, but in my mind, this is why I've never pushed for coverage in major tech blogs. If they pick something up on their own, that's fine... but I've never been sure if the effort is worth the cost and reward.

[dreamdu5t]

I would personally rather have my product or service good enough that customers will market it for me.

To me, being featured in a publication like TechCrunch would only be exciting because of the traffic. Too many people see it as validation for their product/service when it's anything but.

[cliftonmckinney]

I think--potentially--it matters a lot more if you're not funded and/or if it helps you to get "discovered" by both users and folks who might fund you. We got covered in Mashable very early in our product evolution. It helped us a ton. We're a small startup in Memphis, TN and the coverage gave us some much-needed exposure and, at least partly, an air of legitimacy with VCs. Post-funding there are many more mechanisms for getting the word out about how awesome you are, but before that event happens there's nothing better than a little free advertising from a major tech blog.

And in the end the coverage has helped us become a better company. We have many many more users now than we did before the feature, and the exposure helped us gain quite a few "champion" users whose feedback has been invaluable to us as our product evolves.

Key thing for us was to make sure it was stated explicitly that we were pretty brand new. Huge props to Jolie O'Dell for working with us on that. We got a lot of new users from the article and for the most part they've been patient with us as we improve. And best of all we've started relationships with tech press that will hopefully help us out when we release super awesome feature x, y, and z.

My two cents...

[dshipper]

I think that that's absolutely a good question to ask yourself. And the answer is that it depends. For WhereMyFriends.Be getting covered on Mashable was absolutely worth it. We've had over 40,000 signups largely from that article. For DomainPolish, my most recent project, it was awesome to get the coverage but it hasn't been a huge driver of sales yet. So I think the jury is still out. It could lead to a connection to a really awesome VC or startup guy that could give me advice to take it to the next level etc.