The challenge that we have is to find a way to reach these scientists. They rarely, if ever, read techcrunch or hacker news and the standard publications in that space have a long publication cycle.
Ideas to reach out to life-science researchers welcome! One guerilla thing we did last week was to get coffee sleeves with "Quartzy, Caffeine for you Lab". We went to the coffee shop near the research buildings at Stanford and put in these sleeves next to the milk and sugar!:)
You want grad student mailing lists. Lab managers are often the unhappiest and lowest-ranked (or longest-lived) grad students. They'll love what you do. A simple email to their listserve and they'll use you right away.
Sweeten the announcement of your service with something like a "messiest lab cabinet" contest for lab students to photograph their lab cabinet and send it in. The winners get something free, and you get tons of publicity for the product.
Last: advertise on phdcomics.com. If there's one forum that reaches every single graduate student in the country, it's PhD Comics.
True, but if their grad students tell them "If you buy this product, I will have more time to get real work done", then they would probably be willing to dip into their grants.
Just to be clear, Quartzy is free for scientists to use. We want to close the gap between suppliers/manufacturers and scientists. So we are making money by hosting catalogs, running deals etc. Basically charging suppliers who have deep pockets instead of the scientists who are always strapped for resources.
Have you considered taking out ads in popular research magazines? Everybody reads Nature, and I'm sure a well written ad would do wonders for you guys. Love the idea by the way. As a sciences student I totally see how useful this can be in labs.
We did bring out an ad in Nature a few months ago but the response was underwhelming. The thing with marketing for a startup, we have painfully discovered, is to try non-traditional approaches. Basically something that the other big companies with tons of money are not doing because they are either afraid of looking silly or would think that it would not work... Doing the expected thing doesn't work because it gets priced up to the point that it does not make financial sense.
For example, at a recent conference we had a very simple booth. Other large established companies had these giant booths that needed cranes with espresso machines and what not. The only thing we did was put out a scrabble board and gave out a Quartzy t-shirt every hour or so to the one with the largest score in that hour. We had a line of people waiting to play the game. So silly stuff like scrabble leader-board got people's attention.
btw, scrabble because Quartzy is the highest scoring opening word in Scrabble!
Just as another data point we also tried magazine ads in a couple of different journals with lower than expected results. The experience also really made me appreciate the statistics in the online world.
Conferences have been decent, but good old word of mouth is where we are seeing our biggest success. The trick (for me at least) is being able to plant enough seeds to get the word going.
You reached us through hacker news. I'm a software engineer (cbio now, formerly part of the operations team) at a biotech. I forwarded a link to our lab manager and COO. We have solved order management using a google form and google spreadsheet. resource management using a whiteboard or google calendar (one or the other seems to work depending on the group). We are currently looking to solve protocol management.
I would start by contacting major Universities in my area, or in the country, that are known for their life-science programs. Many scientists who graduate stay and work for a few years at their U, so it may be a good place to start. You may even consider talking to the professors directly.
Also, maybe ask around and join their groups, forums, discussions, or any place you can go to reach your target market.
