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This is my first question on "onStartups" so please be constructive if my question is not appropriate so I can get real help on this.

I really pushed hard and created something that is quite different for content management in that it uses a REST-style interface, HTML5 editing and then can be plugged in to any server-side website in 5 minutes. It runs off a CDN so it has extreme availability and is already on a scalable architecture. Its Content Management or a CMS as a Service and acts as a content delivery network for your images and movies etc.

It has a decent user base at least in terms of who's using it as its in use in high traffic ecommerce sites.

However,

I'm not a marketer. I'm a programmer. I don't know how to market very well. I feel rather stupid in this area.

Any suggestions?

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You could go to websites with user generated content and post all the awesome features of your system as part of the content. Then put the websute URL as your username so that people in that community go there to see this awesome thing you posted all the features about. It helps if you also have some rep on network sites that give you a bonus 100 rep on this new site which will help keep people from thinking you're just asking the question to promote your product. Seems like a winning strategy to me... Just sayin' :-) – umassthrower Dec 23 '11 at 21:53
I'm kind of going a different route in terms of forums. I'm actually putting up useful info on stackoverlow.com and have my profile list out accomplishments. I have been getting traffic that way as legit curiosity rather than direct self promotion. It seems to be working as my rep is going up really fast and I'm in the top 1% for the week. :) – zipstory.com Dec 24 '11 at 8:06

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I will gladly put on my marketer hat for this one (I do copy writing for ISVs.) This is a great question.

As a host of several web sites I have wondered what "the cloud" could possibly do for me. The alternatives that are open to low end publishers in terms of CMS tend to be traditional "message board" type packages like Drupal, Wordpress, etc. The problem of delivering rich content has been on the shoulders of the publisher. The best solution I have been able to come up with myself is to host VPS space or a dedicated server. Both are a pain because you have to dedicate half of your work life to making certain that things are running smoothly. Load balancing and scalability for the small fry is simply not available.

So, let me ask you this:

Why did you write this product in the first place? What real life problem or shortcoming of existing solutions were you trying to solve?

If my reflection above on the nature of selecting and using a CMS has any relationship to your reasoning, then just work outward from that point. Try to reason like a customer and challenge your statements like a customer would. Just as you want to save money or do things better before you spend on something, your customers will reason the same way.

IE: ask these questions of yourself and formulate convincing trial answers:

Who do you help?

What technical problem do you solve?

(Big rhetorical question for hosting) How do you help your customers save money and/or deliver their content better?

So I don't have a discrete, single answer for you. I doubt anyone does. But I see promise.

Initially when I read "CMS" as a tag for someone's product I think "with everything out there that is free, that's a stupid thing to develop as a commercial product."

BUT... you have a really interesting spin on the concept, by making content delivery networks accessible without coding (if I get your product's main idea.) If I were you I would leverage that fact ("milk" it) for all it's worth.

I am open to a further dialog, either here or off line.

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Thanks Don. Here is the link www.kitgui.com I didn't launch this out of a vacuum actually and I didn't even think of making it as a business until several people begged me to do it as they said it was a great product not to mention clients saying "wow" as a normal thing when using it. So it started in production websites as a tool to help my company be independent of the server-side with rapid setup but yet still have it programmatic and easy to whip up infinite pages by visiting a URL pattern, like "/articles/somearticle" and only exists once saved. Scale is no issue as its leaning on a CDN. – zipstory.com Dec 23 '11 at 22:07
Thanks for the accept. Wow, actually, you are in a terrific position that is better than your initial posting indicated. You have plenty of social proof of your solution based on demand from people that have used it. Here is an exercise for you: ask your users what they like about it and use them as a source of inspiration, testimonials, and feature requests. I will also say this as a "user surrogate" - your best market for this platform will probably be users interested in adopting CDNs but having no clue about how to get started. You need this to be a turnkey, wizard-directed application. – user2757 Dec 24 '11 at 5:40
Right. That makes sense. The part I need to figure out is how to convey the marketing message so its easy to see the benefits quickly. I'm not sure if I'm doing that effectively because people say KitGUI is better than the website lets on so not sure how to interpret that. – zipstory.com Dec 24 '11 at 6:46

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