You'll have to build an audience first. I read a lot of the mixergy Entrepreneur majority of the successfull ones all had audience or contacts before they had customers. An audience or contact is different from a customer because they are just people who are interested in you, whereas customers go a step further and buy. However an audience or contact allows you to make offers and build a customer base.
You can build an audience by making friends on hacker news, if you're known for making great contributions to the hacker community
you can build audience. So it's important to be genuinely interested in the community. Once you have an audience you can make them an offer, and if it's any good you'll have customers. And interesting recent example of this is edw519 ebook. Ed genuinely enjoys the hacker news community and people enjoy his contributions which are basically his comments/submissions. I doubt his intentions was ever to sell an ebook of his comments, but he is doing that now, and the site promoting it has been viewed 20923 times, and that's only because he is part of the community and has an audience. see:
http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-hacker-news-comments-into-...
It's a small experiment on Ed's part, but it won't be worthwhile without an audience.
If you're interested in more specific ways to build an audience stay tuned.
You don't have to "build an audience first" - that's just one of many possible strategies. It's often promoted by bloggers - who often happen to have found success because of their audience.
For example, Groupon never "had an audience" - they got on the telephone and rang up small businesses.
That's a great observation actually. When I originally created StartupLi.st in my tent while servine the US Navy on deployment in Afghanistan, the only way I could "gain an audience" was to make the effort to contact each startup before I featured them. It worked brilliantly, and will still be a strategy I'll use as http://startupli.st grows. Thanks again for your comment!
You can build an audience by making friends on hacker news, if you're known for making great contributions to the hacker community you can build audience. So it's important to be genuinely interested in the community. Once you have an audience you can make them an offer, and if it's any good you'll have customers. And interesting recent example of this is edw519 ebook. Ed genuinely enjoys the hacker news community and people enjoy his contributions which are basically his comments/submissions. I doubt his intentions was ever to sell an ebook of his comments, but he is doing that now, and the site promoting it has been viewed 20923 times, and that's only because he is part of the community and has an audience. see: http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-hacker-news-comments-into-...
It's a small experiment on Ed's part, but it won't be worthwhile without an audience. If you're interested in more specific ways to build an audience stay tuned.
Also read: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-easiest-way-to-succ...