Marketing on a shoestring (aka Mindquilt is going to Boston)

So the news is out: Mindquilt has been selected as one of the four finalists of the Enteprise 2.0 Launchpad, and we're going to Boston to have our 5 minutes of glory on the stage!

It really feels so good to be in the final, especially considered that we were one of the few (the only?) participant who still hasn't publicly released its product. So how could we get there? Here is our recipe: feel free to add your suggestions to improve this short "marketing-on-a-shoestring" checklist!

That's arguably one of the most important factor. While we have been running in stealth mode for a few months now, we have never been shy to share our project with a number of people. We have showed our presentation to our investors, colleagues, friends, possible partners... a sort of Mindquilt extended family. Investment: a lot of time, but it doesn't seem like work

We did the marketing video with Screenflow. It's a bit pricey (99$), but very nice tool that gives you both screen capture and basic video editing. We just recorded the audio with a cheap microphone and Audacity and yes, we (ehmm I) messed up a bit, and the audio has a bit too much echo. Oh well, I think it is good enough. Investment: about 2 days + 99$

Simply, we twitted (tweetted?) quite a lot. We tried to keep the promotional tweets to an acceptable level, and to have conversations with people. Converse, tweet, retweet. Two weeks ago we had around 40 followers (mostly friends), now are at 120. Investment: a few minutes a day

Creating a simple promotional Facebook application takes literally minutes, and there are plenty of tutorials online. I created ours using the standard template, plus a little javascript function to add the Mindquilt badge on the user Wall. Have a look at it athttp://apps.facebook.com/votemindquilt/ (as you can see, it's now a bit broken, but it was working!). Investment: 1 hour

Facebook and Twitter promotions link to Vote for Mindquilt, a very simple website I created in an hour. You can see there's no designer hand behind it (she's busy working on the real app), just a white website, font-family: Helvetica Neue, font-weight: 200; these are my designer skills! Investment: 1hour

On Vote for Mindquilt you can see our four "funny badges". Of course, you will need a real designer to do them. We used the badges as a reminder to our twitter and facebook followers to vote for us, posting one badge per day in the last few days of the poll. Investment: about 2 days of a designer.

We actually didn't blog that much. The reason is I was the only one with a blog before joining Mindquilt, and a pretty abandoned one. Creating a blog just to promote a company (even a cool one :) ) doesn't seem fair to me. I'd rather call it spam. So the only blog post we launched was in my blog.

That's all folks. That's not rocket science, but it actually seemed to work. We've got plenty of emails of people asking for more details or a demo, and most importantly we've got our ticket to Boston.