I sometimes read things like this and wonder if I should honestly take them seriously or not.
Cuil did great on the PR front. Sure, their product wasn't all that wonderful, but getting that much attention even if lackluster is something most startups can only dream of.
We're in a similar situation to the poster, but since we're B2B our "testing" basically means working with two customers. We're planning on launching with as much hooplah as we can raise when our demo site goes live in the near future.
There's a lot of power in a launch; it's your chance to get it right and get some attention. At no other point early in the startup will you have as much momentum to getting PR attention. If you can pull it off reasonably it's a great chance to catapult your startup a good ways down the road.
I totally agree. There is a lot of power in the launch. That's why you should only use it once you have something that can actually impress then tens of thousands of people who'll come and have a look.
You say Cuil did a great job on the marketing. Yes, they did. However, most people who went and tried Cuil had a bad experience. That compares very unfavourably with Google, which is unflinchingly brilliant. Result? Sure, Cuil did great by getting (say) a million people to try them on the first day. But of that million, maybe a thousand will actually use them more than once.
It's not really worth going through all that PR work if your stick rate is only 0.1%. Unless, of course, the whole thing was about investors / buyers, not about users (which I believe is the case).
Cuil did great on the PR front. Sure, their product wasn't all that wonderful, but getting that much attention even if lackluster is something most startups can only dream of.
We're in a similar situation to the poster, but since we're B2B our "testing" basically means working with two customers. We're planning on launching with as much hooplah as we can raise when our demo site goes live in the near future.
There's a lot of power in a launch; it's your chance to get it right and get some attention. At no other point early in the startup will you have as much momentum to getting PR attention. If you can pull it off reasonably it's a great chance to catapult your startup a good ways down the road.