About the Start-up:
Q) What is the URL of your start-up?
A) http://promotehour.com/
Q) What problem your Start-up solving? or planning to solve?
A) Building a product is easy, selling it is hard.
Most of the start-ups fail because the founders can not find enough customers. Worst, lot of them spend lot of money in building the product only to find either there is no market to buy the product they have created or market wants something else. So market validation is key for the success of any start-up.
There are lot of good communities full of early adopters for all kind of start-ups who love to try new products. Such communities e.g. Hackernews, Producthunt, Betalist has been massively helpful to lot of start-ups in getting early stage traction. But most of the early stage entrepreneurs have no idea about which are the communities and how to promote. Through Promotehour, we are trying to gather good communities where startups can promote themselves.
Q) How does it benefit the end user?
A) Promotehour has a growing list of 100+ communities which help startups to get early set of customers and also critical feedback. This list also contains a brief advice on how to submit your startup on each place along with important metrics like community reach, cost of submission, audience segments. And this list is completely FREE.
We also have a paid service where we help entrepreneurs in submitting on such sites for a small fee. This can save lot of time and efforts.
Along with that, we also help budding entrepreneurs via our Peplaunch program where we help in building a landing page for her/his idea and acquire early customers.
Via Promotehour, we are taking ‘Find customers first’ approach. What we mean by this is, you should find customers first before actually building your product.
Q) Is there any unique feature in your start-up product/Service? Which differentiates you from rest of the Products/Services?
A) There are lot of blog posts which give a list of sites to submit your startup to. But all of these posts just provide link of website. In case of Promotehour, we also provide important information about the website and how you can take advantage of it in best way possible.
Q) What is the current state of your start-up (idea, product testing and beta, live)?
A) Beta
Q) When was your start-up born?
A) In Jan’15
Q) How many Jobs your start-up created till to-date (we believe the co-founders Jobs are the first ones created (
A) 3
Q) What business Domain/ Industry vertical your Start-up is focused on?
A) Startups
About the Founders:
Q) Where you did get the idea?
We are regular visitors on Hacker News and Reddit. Frequently we came across questions like: ‘Does anyone know list of communities to submit startup?’ many times. We couldn’t find a great resource that can tell new startupers on how to submit startups on each one. So we created one of our own and way cooler than what was available.
Q) Where did you meet the co-founders?
We are college friends
Q) How the hell did you convince them to leave their job, and join you!!
We always wanted to work together as we get along with each other really well. But unfortunately we didn’t get same location in our companies. So, we quit the job and never looked back.
Q) How could you guys/gals stick together? (we assuming sticking together w/o salaries is quite difficult)
It has been tough to work without salaries for a long time but we trust each other with our decisions. Plus, running a startup together is more fun than job. But yes, we make some money now by consulting few startups. So, that takes care of expenses.
Q) Who are the other Founders/Co-founders?
A) Mona Soundankar & Jit Salunke
Q) Where is your start-up located?
A) Pune
About the Technology:
Q) What Technology Stack do you use?
A) HTML5/CSS3/JSS & Bootstrapp. We have kept it very simple as these are early days.
Q) What technology stack do you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
A) Anything that gets the MVP out in the shortest time possible. Infact, we will recommend not to spend too much time on deciding technology. Just get started with what you know.
Q) What inspired you most to start-up? Was the technology? Was the idea? was it the problem?
A) It was problem. We have personally seen and even experienced on our own how much time and money entrepreneurs waste in building a business nobody wants to pay for.
About the money:
Q) How did you pool up $$$ to get started/ build a MVP (Minimum value product)?
A)From our savings
Q) How did you guys/girls overcome the problem of Chick first egg first (Product first or Investment first) ?
From experience. Raising money without having product or customer is futile unless you are ex-googler or have successful exit under your belt. It was natural choice to get the MVP out in the market.
Q) How much are you guys funded now?
A)Not funded yet
Q) What’s your funding model (self funded, seed funding, VC etc), who are the Investors
A)self funded/Bootstrap
