Hi Pranay
These are, I guess, the million dollar questions!
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In the early days I would say it’s about creating good, believable content. When we started, we didn’t write a piece about ScreenCloud and how great we were, we filmed a video explaining how to get your Tweets onto a screen using a Google Chromecast. And then we did the same thing but using an Amazon Fire TV stick. So really try and be where your customers are and write about the real problems you are solving. We also used Adwords and are on review sites such as G2 and Capterra. Unfortunately, it’s a question of plugging away and being consistent. Down the line you can start doing outbound, but that is expensive and you need to have a mature product and a very clear idea of who you are targeting.
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You need to decide if you think funding will make the difference between getting you to where you need to be or not. For us, we knew we wanted to move fast, we knew what we had to do and we didn’t want to boot-strap it and take longer to get things going. We also wanted to know quickly if it wasn’t going to work so we could move on. So for us investment was the right thing, but it doesn’t have to be for everyone. There are plenty of companies who never took any investment and succeeded. If you do want to go down that route, I would start as soon as you are confident that you have something that could be successful but feel you are being held back too much because of funds. Make sure you don’t give away too much in equity and ideally look for enough money to take you to your next milestone.
Good luck!