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by rms
7021 days ago
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It seems like you're looking for a perfect answer as to how Granmos or Parakey could become one of the top three operating systems. I don't have the exact solution, but I know there is an enormous market and I wouldn't need ten million users to have a company worth acquiring. If I knew how to market Granmos to the point of becoming a monopoly crushing success I would probably already be getting paid millions as a consultant. I know Granmos can be successful, even if it doesn't reach the ten million user mark. PR is a very important way of marketing for Granmos. You can do a local newspaper press release. Write an article about how a college student is making it easy for his grandparents to use computers. Send it to every local newspaper in America. Get new users. This is the kind of thing you can do for free, but professional PR people do it better. Maybe I could do something really crazy, like giving stock options to anyone who acts as an evangelist or developer. As for advertising, it would mainly be cost-per-action style ads. Affiliate links for online shops and such. You can do things like pitch a free magazine subscription offer at users. Those affiliate programs can pay $5 per action. Also there's the money you get when someone searches Google through your site. The important thing is to stick to advertisements that have some kind of benefit for the user. Tracking the referrals isn't a hard problem. You could distribute Granmos live CDs with your new users automatically tracked to you. Otherwise, when a new account is created, fill in the referral box on the signup page. |
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This would mean reviewing the actual use case and realizing that PR saying your software is easy to use isn't too compelling. Distributing CDs seems very 90s AOL, costs quite a bit of money, and doesn't have a great conversion rate.
Sorry, rms, if I've come across as too critical -- I'm just trying to ask the questions that need to be asked. It's a mental workout of sorts.
I'm still very excited to hear more about Parakey -- it's about time computers became useful!