
How startups such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Groupon acquired their first users - catherinezng
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2clqa3/how_startups_such_as_dropbox_airbnb_groupon_and/
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probably_wrong
In short: spam (AirBnb), cheat (fake Reddit users), and/or gamify your process
to addict your users like a casino would (Foursquare). This is usually seen as
unethical, but if you make a lot of money then it's all right in the end.

I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with
marketing? "

~~~
bahmboo
I find none of this unethical and actually pretty typical web marketing stuff
- tame even. Not exactly sure who was harmed and in the end the consumer
really wanted what was offered.

~~~
snomad
I worry that tech's gamification - gone too far for addiction - will be this
generation's big tobacco settlement.

~~~
brogrammernot
That's quite a hyperbole.

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yomly
I mean, social media preys on people's insecurities and need for validation
and is allowed for anyone over 13.

Pay to win mobile games are designed to be addictive and upsell you to
continue playing.

At least in a casino you have a chance of winning money.

The most terrifying thing is that with tech, the data harvesting is immediate
and far reaching - people's entire jobs in UX are basically to make games more
_engaging_ (aka addictive).

Currently the addictiveness of tech is evolving faster than human wisdom and
regulation can keep up so while hyperbolic, there is some sense to the
doomsaying.

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CM30
I've always found it amusing how shocked/surprised people are about the Reddit
fake users strategy. It's like, the best way you can tell people had no
experience with internet forums or community management before the days of
social media.

What Reddit did here is basically what about 70%* of internet forums did to
get their initial users. Made up a bunch of fake user accounts and posted
under them for however long it took until actual people started using the
site. Heck, some people did this on an almost industrial scale with stuff like
Yahoo Answers feeds and what not.

That's because people don't use a community that isn't active for much the
same reason they don't tend to eat in a restaurant that's deserted; they take
the lack of activity as a sign of low quality. So if you want to get a
community site active, you'll need to resort to 'questionable' things.

* I say this because there are other means of getting forums active, like doing post exchanges with people on admin/forum promotion sites or signing up to services which give you points for posting on other websites in the network and then do likewise for people who use your own site. But to some degree, almost all forums and community sites get big due to 'enticed' users that aren't posting there purely for the love of the topic/community.

~~~
GuiA
The best forums I've been a part of/moderated were forums that originally
served for customer support for a product/company, and naturally became a hang
out spot for people with interests in common.

I've been part of several dozen such forums over the years, from hundreds to
tens of thousands of users. None of them had capital dedicated to community
building. I've also seen many people try to follow the model you outlined
(faking users) and none of them were successful.

Obviously that approach seems to work in some cases (if you have cash to
burn?), but I'm glad that I've seen only more genuine undertakings succeed.
Seems more like the kind of internet I want to be a part of.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, it's likely different for a support forum/forum that used to be a
support forum. In that case, the popularity of your product or service can
create a community without needing to do anything special on the forum side of
things.

But what I said about fake users definitely applies a lot more if your forum
is the entire website and the community is the only goal there. Your average
gaming/film/tv/music/sports/whatever forum lives or dies based on how many
people appear to post/visit every day.

Also, it doesn't take any cash to have fake users/activity. Just a lot of free
time to spend posting away under pseudonyms. If you don't have that time, you
can always do things like literally edit the forum stats (there are plugins
for that[1]), 'buy' services from certain websites to post for you[2] or if
you're really morally questionable, set up a script that takes random people's
accounts and makes them appear to be online[3].

Really, community management is a lot like SEO. You've got everything from
people who don't do anything in the slightest bit 'shady' to build activity
and just kind of hope they can market the forum on their own to those who do
things 100 times less 'ethical' than having fake user accounts.

1\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbull...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=117933)

2\. [https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-
packages.6/](https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-packages.6/)

3\. [https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-
users.4845/](https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-users.4845/)

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snug
One of "How I built this" best episodes, IMO, is about Airbnb.

[https://soundcloud.com/best-of-tech-startups/how-i-built-
thi...](https://soundcloud.com/best-of-tech-startups/how-i-built-this-airbnb-
joe-gebbia)

------
DrScump
In contrast, Paypal initially paid a sign-up bounty of $5 per user.

~~~
stephengillie
Square sent out free card-to-headphone adapters, so you could plug it into
your phone and start receiving payments through their app.

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epmaybe
IIRC, they were also the first to get a card reader into that form factor.
They were the first to make mobile credit card payments feasible.

~~~
doublerebel
Square wasn't the first by any means, and in fact Square's first card readers
were unencrypted (cc data sent plain over the audio jack) while most of the
industry had moved on to encrypted readers.

What they did was make it cheap, reliable, and iPhone styled. Many of the
swiper sources cost upwards of $40/unit and were prone to failure, not to
mention black bulky and ugly.

Source: I made an early MVP for a potential Square competitor.

~~~
praneshp
THat's why your parent said "in that form factor", I think.

~~~
doublerebel
At the start, all Square did on the hardware side was slightly repackage an
existing generic swiper. Our MVP swiper was equally small. It was the overall
easy onboarding (free decent software, no cost swiper) and marketing that
really did it. There were several competing companies who just didn't play the
growth game.

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dalbasal
I don't know what lines exactly you can draw through all of these. Maybe...,
how you get users at first may not be what you will be doing later on.

Some of these are treacherous, if you keep in mind that there are various
hindsight biases inevitable in a list like this. Forum sockpuppeting is a
little dishonest, but it doesn't give me the creeps. On a dating sites it
would. More sensitive feelings involved. Acquisition methods can get
"addictive" if they are not surpassed by other user acquisition methods, so
there's a danger of becoming a spammy, creepy company. This is where hindsight
biases probably blind us to all the AirBnBs that got stuck spamming craigslist
rather than using it as a stepping stone.

The stories I like best here are Tinder, Groupon and the other "start local"
strategies. FB did this to an extent too. It's hard to answer the chicken-egg
riddle generally, but if we're asking about an individual chicken the answer
is obviously "egg."

Unscalable local stuff lets startups compete on a seperate playing field
because "doesn't scale" often means no one else is doing it. It also lends
well to meeting users and starting simple. It also helps for thinking up
startup ideas. If the question becomes " _how to get 70 people in one area
using this thing &_" problems become more tractable, and ideas flow better.

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speps
And Spotify started with being a torrent client for the employees MP3 library:
[http://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-
mp3-fi...](http://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-files-
new-book-1795109991)

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a_c
About the video making part, can someone provide some resources on making
videos (company, websites, software etc)? Looking at kickstarter, I find many
of their video share a common "theme". I wonder if there are company/online
service that dedicated in making video for kickstart campaigns?

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crispytx
A lot of people here in the comments section are saying that the things these
companies did to launch were unethical. I disagree. It just goes to show you
the lengths one must go to successfully launch a new product/service out into
a vacuum. To create something new and original from nothing, you may have to
go to extreme lengths.

