I admit, I know nothing about marketing. I'm the technical guy--the geek in the back of the room who no one understands.
With your help, I'm going to change all that.
Background
I've been sending emails to influential blogs, websites, online magazines, and individuals explaining them the benefits of JKN and hoping that they get to read it and write about it. The emails I send are not spam. Although unsolicited, I send one email at a time, individually crafted for that person.
The experiment
It takes me a considerable amount of time to write each email and so far, my success rate has been pretty slim. So I started thinking: why not post my marketing emails to my blog and get help and pointers from marketing experts? Also, other web entrepreneurs can learn from my failures (and hopefully successes too) and apply it to their own marketing plan. We can call it Open Source Marketing Community Driven Marketing ("CDM").
How can you help?
Three ways:
- Give feedback by commenting. Feel free to use the JKN Annotate buttons.
- Send out your own JKN marketing emails. If you forward me your marketing email, I will post it to this blog and give you full credit.
- If you have your own blog, email newsletter or are a member of a newsgroups, discussion list, or forum than you are the type of person we are trying to reach! So you can take a short cut and let your readers/colleagues know about JKN if you feel it is relevant to them.
- I will not list any actual email addresses that I send to. Although most of these email addresses can be obtained with minimal effort, I don't want to be even indirectly responsible for extra spam. I will also strip out any email addresses from any of your marketing emails that I post.
- For competitive reasons, I may have the remove parts of my emails that I post. But I will keep that to a minimum.
If you send any marketing emails about JKN:
- Only one email at a time. Absolutely no spam or unsolicited bulk email.
- Say who you. Do not conceal your identity.
- Be honest about JKN. Please don't exaggerate (yes, JKN can improve your life. But no, JKN cannot brew coffee and walk your dog.)
I started this blog on May 11, 2007 so I will start by back-posting my earlier emails. To make it easier to track, I will back-post with the date I sent out the email. Please be patient with me because it may take me a while to catch up. Don't get discouraged, because at the end of all this, there is a (somewhat) happy ending. It's just going to take me some time to get there. Once I am caught up, I will post the marketing emails when I send them.
1 comments:
Yaakov,
I saw your presentation earlier this evening at the NY Tech Meetup and wanted to provide some feedback (you asked for it right?)
First, congrats on building a cool and clearly useful app.
Second, I think the overall user experience needs some work. I see www.sharedcopy.com and www.diigo.com as much easier to use than JKN. E.g. ability to have functionality built into browser so you don't have to go to jkn.com first. Ability to add 'stick notes' that become visible when you mouse over the highlighted text.
Third (sorry to be blunt) the jkn domain needs to be changed. It simply doesn't tell me anything about the tool. Its also doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
You can do all of the above and have a similar product to the competition....which is still not going to be enough. This brings me to my last point - find applications that need this technology and sell or license it to the appropriate industry/companies. E.g. maybe american express wants their online customers to be able to highlight potentially fradulent chanrges on their statement and submit it for review....web self service - saves time and $$ for both customer and american express. This is simply one example. I would do the research to find other applications that truly solve a problem.
If you want to chat more about the above ides, don't hesitate to contact me. Good luck,
Faraz Qureshi
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