Seth Godin said it best. I'll apply it for your situation.

Software is cheap. Deployment is cheap. Operations are cheap. Marketing is cheap. Advertising is cheap. What is really expensive is gaining and keeping the attention of paying customers. And it is getting harder & harder to do this as more and more good web applications appear.

Your goal is to gain and keep the attention of customers and potential customers. You may want to start by letting some potential customers use the app to gain and keep their attention. If they truly use it regularly, you will know (by using a good analytics package). You can also use them for product feedback, and even pricing & value feedback.

A blog is a good way to keep attention as is a e-newsletter. A useful web application is a good way to keep attention.

A referral program is a great way to give your enthusiastic supporters a cut of the action, and that can help it "go viral".

You don't need to spend a penny on this, let the competition waste money on ads...

Ideally you would have started this process long before your product was finished (albeit v1 is never "Finished"!), what you need to do is connect with people who have the problem that your app is going to solve, tell them how good your solution is. Do this as much as your can to create a community (or a Tribe - See Seth Godin, Tribes.) the power of this community is far greater than the advertising opportunities that exist.

Each member of this community will start spreading the work and increasing the size of the community, and it will grow exponentially. Like i said ideally you start this process long before your product is ready for 2 reasons, first it gives you valuable market research and secondly it creates desire for your product, having customers waiting for v1 is a great by product of early evangelism (See Apple - Any Product).

In terms of indexing, its an iterative process and will not happen over night you can maximise this by having a great product and writing lots of great content about the product and the problem it solves.

The way avoid being lost in a sea of competitors is by avoiding horizontal markets and commodity products, find a niche (or several) that you can effectively target, again let your competitors waste revenue trying to attract the masses, while you efficiently target more profitable niches.

All of the example companies you mentioned have in common that they either have a great product which people talk about (and link to) or they write a lot of great content which people talk about (and link to) or in many cases both.

In Summary... don't spend money on advertising when you can create a targeted, engaged community of users for Free!

All the Best.

Floyd.

I completely agree with Floyd on this one. No advertisement is going to buy a subscription to your app, it won't integrate your app's features into it's daily life, and (probably most importantly) it has no reputation to give merit to it's referral.

This is not to say that advertising isn't useful, but rather to emphasis what Floyd was hinting at, a few key words from an authority in a field, or the momentum of a loyal community of users will do more good for your app then any amount you drop on advertising.

After that, it's totally up to the app. Having a background in recording, I always like to drop in some music analogies; you can get people to show up to your band's gig - but getting them to like it, buy the album, and hopefully come out to more gigs is another story.

I also agree that this should have been something that you were working on while developing the app, but that shouldn't discourage you - certainly, your app has a niche, a community you are hoping to address. Start to research their needs, likes, and dislikes and see how you can make your app a cog that moves in sync with their thought process, and you should be fine.

Let me know what you're thinking Frank

you need a cobweb.. listen even twitter got copied. think of your engineers, Secretary as a set of characteristic, interests that are similar to others in social ways. your worried about getting copied or a quick meteoric rise to greatness.. ain't going to happen. As soon as you go live you will find a dozen things you want to fix. India don't copy you until you get successful. don't even stress that. Nothing you can do. the one thing you can do is take your logo, make it your team, your people, the drama of a start up, tweet on the toilet marketing stradegy. dance like an idiot on youtube tuesdays.

you all think your website or app is more important that your vanity URL's... and your so wrong because you don't want one sale, you want the ability to stay in contact with them for the repeat business and also access to their friends. fans,followers,subs are the most valuable commodity on the web. all you have to do is look at your people... and ask what are you passionate about... and mix that with work talk where you talk about what your job is something very relatable, focus on how we do that. a couple of webcams. maybe an office. tell the story of your company, where you live type deal, even pictures of the cool places. where is good to eat using one of those apps. it is your home..

likely run a daily keyword whore styled videos where you do 3 1 minute news updates matching the tweettrend words.. be original, daring.. no email, no logos in my feed