Consideringeverystartup confronts this question at some point, I was surprised by how little has been written about it.
So I decided to do my own digging.
I spent the past month personally reaching out to founders, scouring interviews, andtapping the Twitterverse.
Otherwise, lets dive into the strategies.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Whitney Wolfe and Justin Mateen would basically run around USC pitching Tinder to sororities and fraternities.
The very first iteration of DoorDash was a website called paloaltodelivery.com with PDFd menus of restaurants in Palo Alto.
He and the team first wanted to see if there was demand.
That was how it all started.
A website with PDF menus and flyers.
They basically all said yes, because Bi-Rite is delicious.
Emily Castor Warren
There was a very significant use of street teams early on at Uber.
They went to places like the Caltrain station and handed out referral codes.
There are stories about how Travis went to Twitter HQ personally and handed out referral codes.
[…]
Evan was willing to try anything to get users.
I would walk up to people and say, Hey would you like to send a disappearing picture?
and they would say, No, Evan later recalled.
Choosing the right neighborhood was essential.
That neighborhood is known as Lorelei.
The community already had some ways to communicate with each other, which was a promising sign.
Thales Teixeira
Apple stores Pinterest
We did all kinds of pretty desperate things, honestly.
I used to walk by the Apple store on the way home.
Id go in and change all the computers to say Pinterest.
Ben Silbermann
(Note: This strategy will obviously be less effective while we shelter-in-place?)
You could make the tool name really really long.
And then traffic came from the search engine.
Thats how we initially got started?
A one-time English major at Berkely, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for creating characters.
Here is more on this number, a bit before we hit the 100,000.
Its been something that was very gradual though.
Within the space of around 9 months, I wrote around 150 guest posts.
It will take a while until you’re able to find the right frequency of posting.
If so, have you invited them yet?
Yelp
Inviting people from our internet (mostly former coworkers from PayPal) drove our initial users.
Russel Simmons
Lyft
Before the waitlists camepersonal email invites to our friends,like the one above.
Emily Castor Warren
Thefacebook.com went up on Wednesday, February 4, 2004.
It was a normal night in the dorm, Moskovitz recalled.
When Mark finished the site, we told a couple of friends.
By the end of the night, we were, like, actively watching the registration process.
Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants.
We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way.
The pattern was to share Slack with progressively larger groups.
We amplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams.
And no one really got it, to be totally honest with you.
[…] But there was a small group of people that were enjoying it.
And those folks were not who I think stereotypically you think of when you think about early adopters.
You know, What is my house going to look like?
What kind of food do I want to eat?
We felt that photography and the visual element of what we were doing really resonated with those people.
And we gave it to those specific people who a large followings.
and thats the day when we actually launched, it had that springboard affect.
Kevin Systrom(Instagram)
Pinterest started as an invite-only community.
The first users were design bloggers Silbermann recruited.
He advised these invitees to only extend admission to people they knew with unique ideas and creative minds.
The exclusive community grew slowly until 2012 when the site removed the invitation requirement.
All you could do on this page was throw in your email address.
I remember distinctly it was a Friday night.
I was just like, Whats going on?
This is not normal.
Something must be wrong.
And I open up Hacker News, and I see No.
1: Chinese Land Spaceship on the Moon, No.
2: Google acquires Boston Dynamics, the Robotics Company, and No.
3 was: Robinhood: Free Stock Trading.
So, first of all, I was like, Oh man, like No.
3 on Hacker News?
This is sort of like every engineers dream in the Valley, right?
The invitation-only element was a vital part of the platforms rise.
This is the day-by-day chart for the initial launch.
Evans high-profile and Oms endorsement must have been a big help in building that sort of buzz.
Dorsey became their best salesman.
He was initially shocked to find out his investment money was going toward an entirely different app than Burbn.
Usually, founders pivoted to a new product as a last-ditch effort to avoid going out of business.
But Dorsey loved Instagram, way more than hed ever loved Burbn.
It reached number one in camera applications in the Apple app store.
For us, one such event was when Mailbox was being shut down.
It was the perfect narrative, Im over here, come look at my company.
[…] I currently haveone of the most widely read articleson how to survive an acquisition.
It was written in response to the Mailbox shutdown.
[…] That post ended up on Medium, and was syndicated to qz.com.
We were able to insert it into the Zeitgeist.
That article probably took me three days of doing nothing else, and another day of shopping it around.
So four days all in.
But those four days bought north of 5,000 signups.
Rahul Vohra
I wrote guest posts on tech publications (likethis article on FastCo) to drive awareness.
In the early days, press was effective in driving adoption.
Additionally, we forwarded compelling products that launched on Product Hunt to reporters that I knew.
Bonus points: We were helping makers and early stage startups get more visibility.
Finding hosts to offer up rooms in their houses was actually the easy part.
Getting people to rent those rooms proved more difficult.
The first counterintuitive strategy was to pitch only the bloggers with the smallest audience possible.
The DNC bump was great for business, but it only lasted a week.
The founders were desperate for a way to extend the impact of the event.
The boxes were delivered as flat rectangles that had to be cut and assembled by hand.
Shortly thereafter, they started selling the political cereal at $40 per box.
Instead,with help from an impressive press blitz(based largely on the teams prior experience i.e.
use whatever youve got going for you), they welcomed people to request an invitation to try Slack.
The big lesson here: Dont underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch.
We were shameless about contacting people who we thought would love the product, says Kevin.
But it paid off.
But not only didThe New York Timesspeak to us, they also sent someone to meet with us.
Over Thanksgiving break, we designed and built Product Hunt.
5 days later, we had a very minimal but fully functional product.
We emailed our supporters a link to Product Hunt, informing them not to share it publicly.
That day we acquired our first 30 users.
