On Oct 20, 2004, at 2:24 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

>
>>
>>>  He is the father of inventor of Seaside http://beta4.com/seaside2/
>>
>> Stef, please, if you're going to tack things onto my bio, let me edit 
>> them first... ;)
>
> I saw ;( (too busy)
> But you should market yourself. Marketing does not mean shit.
> This is not because out there there are bad people selling ugly, 
> horrible stuff and broken solutions that we should not
> just market us the right way.

If you want to see an example of really effective marketing of 
something very like Squeak and Seaside (but inferior, naturally ;-), 
read David Heinemier Hansson's blog, especially when he's talking about 
Ruby on Rails: http://www.loudthinking.com/

He seems to have exactly the right knack for building hype and 
community support around a collection of technologies that, although 
there's nothing wrong with them, wouldn't get far purely on technical 
merits.  A few things I've learned from him, though haven't applied 
yet:
- Preannounce like crazy.  Never say "I just released cool thing X", 
say "I'm working on cool thing X and it's going to be AWESOME".  By the 
time you release you'll have an instant user base and a huge amount of 
feedback.
- Any time any one says anything good about your product, repeat it.  
Blurbs, blurbs, blurbs.
- Constantly talk about how many downloads you've had.  People like to 
use something that lots of other people are using.  And whatever the 
number is, enough exclamation points make it sound big...
- Make lots of video demos; people are lazy, and like to watch more 
than read.

I have a hard time mustering the same breathless excitement that he 
brings to everything, but it really does seem to work.

Avi