That is why it is getting crazy important to get mentioned on sites like TechCrunch, etc. It is not the best mouse-trap that wins ... just be the most known and funded one.
From my experience working for a web design company that also does PR, $1000 certainly won't get you much. A cheap PR firm will charge you at least $100/hour which affords you ten hours. Once meetings, planning and strategics are through, you won't have much left at all. My recommendation would be to learn some basic PR yourself and implement it that way.
I'm guessing by PR you want marketing, and it would be far cheaper and more valuable reading a bit up on it to get a grasp than hiring someone else to do it. Read FastCompany or Inc., they regularly post great articles on that sort of stuff that you can read quickly to learn some valuable base strategies/ideas.
And if you think you don't have time, remember that a PR firm isn't just going to open your website and work magic, they're going to want to spend hours going over your brand, your goals and more. You'll have to have meetings and explain a lot to them. In that time you could easily learn an adequate amount of PR strategies to at least implement something decent.
And I'm guessing if your budget is $1000 you don't need anything major to begin with, which means doing it yourself makes even more sense.
Hmmm,that sounds tempting. I suppose it depends on the type of story and the site it goes on. A reputable site would (ideally) publish stories based on the newsworthiness of a product (meaning they'd publish the story even without the PR firm being the middleman), but I'm sure whatever contacts they have with the news site probably help a lot. Getting on a major, widely read tech news site for a startup I'd say would be worth that easily. I'm not going to guess how they do it, but if they can do what they've promised for the price they've promised, and it's all risk free, I'd say give it a shot.
Can't really say without knowing your core market. It varies between industries. But, a good starting budget for anything small is around $15K. That does not include a lot of side-costs, like media bribes and such (which is a reality these days).
Though I'm not sure if you are asking for PR or marketing. For a $1000 you can definitely get some good marketing going in many industries, though.
A solid PR person in house will run you $85-95k/year. For a small boutique agency, expect to pay 2-5k a month plus per project costs. Large agencies have 20k/mo minimums.
For a non-game app, how hard it is to use cross-platform tools such as Sencha/PhoneGap to develop for both Android and iPhone (and maybe even for tablet) at the same time?
At the moment we have 5 small Linode VPSes (1.5/1/1/768/768) for app/db/solr/redis/async-jobs and paying around $200/month.
I've been looking for alternatives, preferably hybrid dedicated/cloud with good RAM/IO for app/cache/db and cloud based storage. Rackspace seems to offer something like this, but at a higher price. Any other suggestions?
Linode is one of the cheapest providers of VPSes that are mainstream. I think you will have a hard time finding something comparable. I track web hostign companies for my startup ( http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting ) and the only company that jumps to mind is RamNode. But I haven't collected enough data on them to say anything meaningful. They seem to be offering high ram + ssd drives which would match what you're after.
CloudSigma may be worth a try. You can tune CPU/RAM and HDD/SSD storage as you see fit, and they give you 7 days for free to test all the weird things you can come up with. It's based on KVM and you can install anything by uploading an ISO.
Full disclosure: crazy CloudSigma customer running FreeBSD with ZFS in the cloud :)
Note that Rackspace cloud (not sure about their managed services) do not include free bandwidth. It can be a killer if you rely on Linode's bundled bandwidth.
I migrated to Rackspace cloud, due to the Slicehost acquisition and the first month bill was hard to swallow.
What is amazing is how much of those timeless insights is still relevant 6 years from its writing, or even 6 years from now into the future.
What is more amazing is even someone who possesses so much insights, has sufficient financial ammunition and more than enough connection and reputation couldn't make alltop.com a big success.
How about comparing the number of real-life web applications (i.e., not counting final year projects) in each framework, or the number of users each of them serves?
BTW, I've been a long time Pyramid user (since the Pylons days) and can't be happier with my choice.
I wish you had some way to do demo targeting on first use even before signup. When I first visit the site, I see a lot of stuff I'd pay to not have. (Kitschy junk...maybe due to Etsy partnership?).
At the very least, I'd show 2-3 really diverse sets of items on the first page for non-logged-in non-cookied users. Maybe your market is basically 50-70 year old females right now, and so it's worth not making the initial set of items appealing to anyone else. I would hand-curate the front page rather than letting it be what appears to be driven by users, but keep it somewhat up to date with what's popular on the site. The first page view should be beautiful and compelling.
There is actually a list of filter keyword links right above the products. Those are the sample keywords that I want to prime my users, actually with "laptop" as the last keyword. Though I do know it's not obvious enough to most visitors.
The dilemma is if I start to promote things that _you_ care about, my existing users will feel that I'm turning my back on them and quickly drop off.
Geez, I wish I were Pinterest that only needs to serve 50-70 year old females forever :-P
