pam on Nostr: pv and good morning 🌞☕️ sun’s peeking, birds chirping, roosters crowing, ...

pv and good morning 🌞☕️ sun’s peeking, birds chirping, roosters crowing, weather is perfect and a sleepy dog waking up for his walk ❤️

I was reading on how startups find users at the early stages, and found some of this stories fascinating :

Tinder during the early days identified colleges as highest dating profile. They presented to sorority and frat groups and onboarded 15k users manually through their college presentations before going viral.

Brian Chesky of Airbnb went door to door taking "professional" pics and putting them online, slept on people’s living rooms, and grew home by home, block by block.

Stripe brothers immediately installed for anyone who was keen at the YC alumni meets instead of giving the link. This became known as the “collision installations”. Stripe is worth $50B

Alibaba’s Jack Ma sent a Salesforce team across China to meet with factories one by one - the factory owners were reluctant as they neither had internet not wanted to speak to people online. But it obv worked as they surpassed eBay

Quora and Reddit filled their sites with own contents for it to pick up user engagement

Redbull did guerrilla tactic and put empty cans everywhere to make it seem "peer approved". Don’t think this is ethical but for another sugary caffeinated drink to hit the market, it worked

Dropbox launched word of mouth campaign and worked on direct referrals - their users sent 28M referral invites - they increased user base from 100k to 40M users (40x)

Evernote’s founder Libin started with a freemium model - what he found is that the longer customers used the service, the likelier they would pay for it

Canva has both paid and free model, and the paid model is really low priced for the design and feature offerings which makes easy paid customer conversion. You can also pay standalone to the designers (they crowdsource designers).

OkCupid had interesting content market strategy where they will write articles around dating, sex preferences that got a lot of shares. A year after launch they got about 2 million users

Etsy went to the source - the craft community to get people with inventory on board. Etsy is worth $10B

Taskrabbit started with a niche customer segment - they reached out to moms who had other mom friends in their community

Twitter during Jack’s time early days and comeback had some of the most learnings. One was to reach out to influential people in SV, another was to target specific market segments like sports, lifestyle, and country leaders. They also ran diverse campaigns appealing to all age groups, from high school kids to older individuals. One successful campaign story i read involved setting up large monitors at the SWSX festival to display real time user engagement, and within a day user adoption increased from 20k to 60k users.

Jack's square (now block) during the early days is one of my fav stories. One learning was on how he cleverly prioritised less preferred investors first, allowing him to make mistakes and learn before engaging with the ideal ones. I do this a lot now. In another instance, he wrote an article titled "140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail" and while it put them on a vulnerable spot and answered all the questions investors had, it also showed how the founders were transparent and thought ahead. Something I’m going to work on today, adding on to my to do list. Jack is undoubtedly one of the most creative and unconventional founders out there.

That’s about some examples. It takes A LOT to build a product and launch let alone figuring out how to find users, but needed.

A piece from Paul Graham's blog " Do things that do not scale" - talks abt the many ways to look for early stage users. I like this particular statement a lot and served as a timely reminder for me :

“It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.”

Let’s make this work! Have a great day everybody ❤️