The true value in this post is that you gave your unedited email to TC. The world of information in general needs more of this. I'm tired of blog posts about how to do things - everybody wants to reveal what they think worked (e.g. the Secret Sauce) without showing how they acted on that advice (e.g. the meal and its recipe). I don't want a template of your advice, I want to see what YOU did.
Thanks for being strong and bold enough to provide a REAL example!
thank you :). I'm actually updating it with the subject line. I literally spent 30-60 minutes on that subject line testing how it would show up in Gmail.
The interesting thing is how the real thing doesn't necessarily follow all the advice, yet worked anyway. I don't think it tells a story, which is the primary tip. Of course, maybe there isn't a story you can really tell in a sentence or less.
On a different meaning of 'story', writing a headline for your email and an opening that the blogger can more or less copy and paste is always welcomed by less diligent bloggers :)
It probably did a little more than help. By my estimations, having a reputation is far more important than having a product, especially when pitching to TC.
It was a valuable read like the others. Would you mind sharing how you created the product demo video? It would be another nice read if you covered this as a process.
Fwiw, I find PadPressed an awful iPad experience. It is difficult to navigate the site, navigation between pages is slow, the body text font is not properly antialiased and is difficult to read, and from the front of the site, it wasn't clear I had to swipe to open the site. It's obviously trying to make a site feel like Flipboard, but no thanks.
It's the prototype. Were getting there and have lots of work to do. The direct link pages ie- what you see from here on an iPad needs work/ isn't like most others.
Okay. I went to the front of your site though and still found it a sub-optimal web-experience. If it's any consolation, I also hate the iPad optimized version of gmail. The iPad has a full browser, give me the full web.
I actually have a draft of a similar post (except for TUAW, LikeHacker, Mashable, and the like in addition to TC). It should be up today, look out for it. :)
The real question is, did it pay off? Did going exclusively to TC generate the traffic and buzz you were looking for? Would love to hear more about the results.
So PadPressed has somewhere close to 200 customers total. Not a ton in the grand scheme of things, but for an alpha version we're really happy.
I know I sit and preach multiple customer acquisition methods and distribution, but honest truth is, we haven't done any of that over the past 90 days except for the TC coverage. Our shit has been GHETTO. Literally, I left spelling mistakes, unoptimized funnels, analytics,etc. just to see at the worst case scenario how we'd do.
We launched, got the TC coverage, had an influx of customer support (supporting your startup is so overlooked) from customers, and then a trickle down effect of press. Some say the TC bump doesn't do much, but in our case it paid off. We're doing a real release, the new design is breathtaking, and planning real distribution channels/partnerships.
Thanks for being strong and bold enough to provide a REAL example!