Former student of mine (MBA 2009) Charles Vickery, now community manager at Sourcegraph, visited my class via Google Hangout and shared some hacks through which a small tech startup with a low marketing budget and a very small team can still get significant attention. These are some marketing hacks that he shared with my class:
- They hired some Chapman University film school students to record a minor event for forty people that now on their YouTube channel has sixty thousand views.
- They printed SourceGraph t-shirts for $11 that they use to carpet bomb the startup street in San Francisco with. This apparently has brought a lot of attention to their brand.
- They went to a tech conference and live blogged the whole conference and in the process, they became the de facto live blog of the conference with hundreds of thousands of views of their blog.
Everything is news and you can reslice it multiple ways – Charles Vickery
You should also check out when Charles Vickery was featured by the Huffington Post as an opera singing, cocktail-serving “Task Rabbit” assembling furniture. That’s also a way to build a personal brand!