[derefr]

Would you recommend that strategy--having a quiet, unmemorable, word-of-mouth-driven initial launch (which you can call a "beta period"), and then, once you've already got some hooks into the press and a good userbase, a follow-on publicity stunt (which you can call a "launch")?

[philfreo]

This worked well for us at Close.io <http://close.io.>

We had a couple "soft launches" - one where we put up our first email-collecting landing page and invited some people we knew to use the service (Sept '12). Another where we turned on self-signup on our website and invited more people (Nov '12).

Then after a couple months we had some solid active users and a small number of customers, we were also able to get 2-3 good press articles in the same week, which we now consider our official launch (Jan '13).

I think it's good advice to just keep "launching" until somebody notices :)