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It would seem today you must have some sort of a youtube video (vimeo btw, does not allow uploading of 'commercial' videos, many startups may one day find a dead video on their homepage) describing your service or app, so what are the best practices?

Do you just display it as is? Or use illustrations and flying text bubbles all over?

A single narration voice? Or voice actor for each character?

What about background music? Visual effects? Any recommendations on software? I guess windows movie maker won't cut it.

Do you make your video public or hidden? Send fake traffic? You don't want your video out there with 17 views.

I am a tech guy, creating apps is easy. I can get around the coding, design, ux and make it shiny. But how the hell do i get users? 10K/life is all the money i can spend on this.

Social sites are bullshit, unless you got an army of friends, no one is going to notice you.

CPC? Even with insanely low 0.2 per click, and 5% ridiculously high conversion, that’s only 2500 users. Only 5% of them will be loyal users, so we are down to 125. What about next month?

Hoping to get noticed by techcrunch / mashable is stupid.

SEO is also no good, it will take months to get ranked. And If the idea is unique it won’t help (did anyone search for "how do i send 140 char messages" before twitter, or even after?). Trying to rank for more general keywords like ‘find friends online’ is retarded, would take years.

Solution one: Get lucky, get noticed by the players. Solution two: Get funding, switch 10K/life to 30K/month. Solution three: ????.

So what are today's acceptances for installing browser plugin apps? It's hard enough to get users, but also demand from them to install a plugin? Sounds crazy. Will IE users even bother installing anything? It will most likely require much more steps than firefox.

Then again, in firefox featured addons page, some apps get 50k+ weekly downloads.