Many businesses rely on hype and unreliable free methods to promote and sell their products and services.  Don’t get sucked in to this trap.  The boring rainy Tuesday test is a critical test, which all businesses should be able to pass.  It’s all about how you acquire new customers – even on a bad day.
You need to ensure that you can market your products and services – even when exceptional methods (e.g. launches) are not available.  If you don’t get any press on a boring rainy Tuesday, you still need to find new customers effectively.  Early on, when everything’s new, it’s sometimes hard to believe that one day your product won’t be exciting anymore – not even to you.  There will be many boring rainy Tuesdays, and you have to survive them.  On a boring, rainy Tuesday, you will not get media coverage handed to you on a plate.  You will not get bloggers writing about you.  Your users will not happen to create awesome content on other sites.
So what do you do to pass the test? Simple: make sure that paid marketing works for you.  You have to be able to buy new users.  Test methods such as ads, telesales calls, etc. You need to show that you can make money from these new users you pay to acquire, even after covering the acquisition costs.  If your product is free, and highly viral, this test may not strictly apply – but even viral products can benefit from showing they can seed new user communities with paid marketing.  In fact, paid marketing actually works better with highly viral content, as you are buying a whole string of users, not just one.  This helps you create bridgeheads in new markets.
In most circumstances, particularly with paid products, the cost of new user acquisition normally needs to be significant.  Keeping marketing costs too low usually won’t allow the product to grow effectively with scalable marketing. For a business to make money it needs to be able to extract an adequate amount of money from an adequate amount of customers. There are always users you can acquire for free, or cheaply, but these are rarely enough to let the firm achieve scale.
So this is where the boring rainy Tuesday test comes in.  If the only way to make money is to sit and wait for press coverage or viral customers to appear, then the business is not in control of its own destiny. So before you waste your own time, and your investors’ money, make sure your business passes the test.