I don't know why you're targeting startup blogs unless you are intending on selling your services to startups (which has its own problems, chiefly that a million other people are chasing after the same $600 dollars in their bank account). Michael Arrington will have, to a close approximation, the entire population of Silicon Valley send him an email today. Your odds of getting even fleeting attraction are low. Should you get fleeting attraction, you'll find your site crushed under a wave of looky-loos who will make disparaging comments on everything they can before abandoning it.

By comparison, the people you made your application for might actually, you know, want to use it. Why don't you target their blogs? Speak to the people you know in their community? (You do know people in their community, right? If not, turn off the IDE and go meet some people in their community.)

I'd also start your SEO efforts, if you haven't already. (If you haven't, turn off the IDE and...) That is a deep subject when starting from nothing, but the short version is think of ways that linking to you will improve the lives of people who don't want to buy your software, then, tell them that.

Oh, and this comment is going to sound like a broken record from me, but launch is not a one-time event. 99.9999999% of people who see your site will not see it on launch day. For someone who comes in on day 4 or day 40 or day 4,000, your site JUST launched. Optimize for their experience, not Michael Arrington's.

As far as bloggers, unless you invented Google(or worked there) or have millions in funding, it's probably not worth bothering since you won't get much coverage(from the bigger sites). And the type you'll get will most likely get you a few hundred visitors. i.e. a 50,000/mo blog, sent me 5 people.

And the traffic you get from doing a "launch" is usually garbage anyways. And will evaporate within a few days. Unless of course your core users are entrepeneurs who read tech blogs. Then you might have some luck.

Basically a launch doesn't really get you anywhere, you should see "launch" days, as a way for you to declare for yourself that you are open for business. So that you can get serious about marketing.

i.e. for my launch date, we got 5 stories, and a total of 668 visits. That was November 18th, and last month we had 35K visits, Page Rank 5, Sub 100K Alexa Rank, Sub 20K U.S. Alexa Rank, 2K questions(content), 1550 twitter followers, 960 Facebook Fans.

So don't worry about planning for a spectacular launch, just do it, and then get to work.

I'll see if I can write something up later, since it takes a while

The landscape may have changed on the embargo bit (TechCrunch claims not to respect them), or not -- they still seem to respect ours and most startups I know.

Ideas:

1. put beta in your logo and make submit feedback forms as prominent as possible without being annoying

2. maybe include a countdown in days until official launch on the site. reinforce in peoples minds that they will want to come back later or keep an eye on the site.

3. Since you want it to be a 'beta launch', just launch it now. Start pulling users in, they will be able to help you make a bigger media bomb for when you decide to 'launch launch'. hit up all the aggregators and even if you dont get a big impact you can hit them all up again when you decide its no longer beta with a 'launch' story

Once you've done that, I suppose it's time to get more serious about acquiring users.

It's really the "what happens next" bit that I'm not sure about.

No one of significance will notice your software sucks, but when your software is good, investors, customers, and partners will notice.

Even if you get enough traffic to knock down your server, that will just be a boon.

And it's better to get your software out there half-working and get feedback than to build something nice and have to rebuild it after you find out the average user wants something else.

I soft launched http://newsley.com in November via comment here on Hacker news. I wasn't interested in a big splash, but I was really interested in getting a couple of beta users that could give me some good feedback, and that's what I got. It's a good crowd to get some feedback on what's broken and what works.

Since then, I've posted a few more links here in the comments, and prakash posted a link in one of his comments on a thread regarding economic social news sites (thanks). I've also posted a link asking for beta users on Craigslist San Jose, and I've posted a couple links in economic blog comments where appropriate.

Traffic stats so far for 2 1/2 months: 1200 uniques, and close to 5000 page views.

My future marketing plans include buying some more beta users off of Mechanical Turk at $0.05 a pop, and using a $100 credit I have with Adsense. I have a hunch, I'm going to get a lot better traffic with Mechanical Turk than Adsense.

re: funding

The scuttle butt in the Valley is that funding is slowly starting to flow again, but it's still pretty hard to come by unless you have traction. Traction == customers signing up and loving your product and possibly revenue.

I'd focus on making your users really really happy, and slowly build up a customer base from that rather than go for a big splash and hope that things take off.

It's an analytics service for casual / social games and in some cases we're talking games that get millions of plays (we've got several like that in our system already) which can translate into tens of millions of events being logged, and while we've spent tons of time making everything as streamlined and cost-efficient as we can there are unavoidable expenses that might predate our ability to pay for them by ourselves.

I appreciate your concern about scaling your service but I think you should consider a fremium business model that allows you to accommodate more free users at lower cost.

Instead of logging tens of millions of events for free users, you could log just a subset, which will allow you to use far fewer servers whilst allowing free users to "evaluate the usefulness of your new service".

It will also make sure that the future of your startup is not wholly dependent on external investors.

We've done something similar with Trafficspaces. We run our service off Amazon's cloud system, which gives us a lot of flexibility.

If you need assistance on how to structure your freemium model to make sense, send me an email at niyi [at] trafficspaces [dot] com.