I'm not sure what Parakey's doing, but my idea is to use financial incentives to encourage viral distribution. Install Granmos for your parents, your grandparents, the local senior center, and nursing homes. Then, you get a percentage of advertising revenue from all the new users of Granmos that you're helping.
While the elderly would certainly love an easier computing experience, I think my questions above address the overall mainstream population that have a pretty narrow use case when it comes to internet browsing.
Your approach to viral distribution sounds very complicated.
How do you go about placing ads on something that's supposed to ease the computing experience? On top of that, would you need to login using your account at a specific IP address to gain the "credit" for installing the app? How would the system know who to "credit?"
It seems like you're looking for a perfect answer as to how Granmos or Parakey could become one of the top three operating systems. I don't have the exact solution, but I know there is an enormous market and I wouldn't need ten million users to have a company worth acquiring. If I knew how to market Granmos to the point of becoming a monopoly crushing success I would probably already be getting paid millions as a consultant. I know Granmos can be successful, even if it doesn't reach the ten million user mark.
PR is a very important way of marketing for Granmos. You can do a local newspaper press release. Write an article about how a college student is making it easy for his grandparents to use computers. Send it to every local newspaper in America. Get new users. This is the kind of thing you can do for free, but professional PR people do it better.
Maybe I could do something really crazy, like giving stock options to anyone who acts as an evangelist or developer.
As for advertising, it would mainly be cost-per-action style ads. Affiliate links for online shops and such. You can do things like pitch a free magazine subscription offer at users. Those affiliate programs can pay $5 per action. Also there's the money you get when someone searches Google through your site. The important thing is to stick to advertisements that have some kind of benefit for the user.
Tracking the referrals isn't a hard problem. You could distribute Granmos live CDs with your new users automatically tracked to you. Otherwise, when a new account is created, fill in the referral box on the signup page.
I'm not looking for the perfect answer, just the answer to how you would get your first 10 (ten) users.
This would mean reviewing the actual use case and realizing that PR saying your software is easy to use isn't too compelling. Distributing CDs seems very 90s AOL, costs quite a bit of money, and doesn't have a great conversion rate.
Sorry, rms, if I've come across as too critical -- I'm just trying to ask the questions that need to be asked. It's a mental workout of sorts.
I'm still very excited to hear more about Parakey -- it's about time computers became useful!
