To people who wonder how a company like this might happen, here's my take.
A developer constantly talks about his company (that also happens to cater to software developers/hackers) under the pretenses of how well a small software company is growing, which attracts software developers/hackers to read about it from blogs and hear speeches mentioning it at startup conferences, causing them to join the site to see how the site actually works, play around, and report how well they liked the site on their own blogs. This increases the userbase, which of course increases growth, which leads to more blog posts and speeches about how fast the company is growing (same content, but different and much more impressive numbers every month, so the story only continues to get more and more interesting.) Eventually, word grows about it and regular folks start caring after hearing about the user numbers. Mainstream media becomes interested, causing more growth, and so on.
The approach for creating something for fellow hackers, growing the user base, and telling fellow hackers information about how well it's doing for marketing purposes is the approach taken by 37Signals, FogCreek (JoelOnSoftware), and some less known but up and coming startups. Creating something for fellow hackers has been described by Paul in his essays. One young company that I can think of right now that is good at this cycle is GitHub.
The key is to be the one who starts something, not the one who keeps reading and reading about others'.
I didn't say anything about new technology or marketing hacks, but about publicizing itself to other developers, which are also either the target market or a big part of the initial target market. Plenty of fish used the strategy of blogging about its growth, which was picked up by none other than other developers and posted about in developer and indie forums on a regular basis over the past few years. This is exactly what I described--a developer talking about how successful their app is, which causes developers to sign up for it. Remember, the 20-30 year old software developer demographic who would hear about the site is most likely single and with money, making them the perfect target market to seed. This is exactly the same as creating a project management site for developers that grows in popularity to the point most users are no longer developers, or a social news site like reddit.
A developer constantly talks about his company (that also happens to cater to software developers/hackers) under the pretenses of how well a small software company is growing, which attracts software developers/hackers to read about it from blogs and hear speeches mentioning it at startup conferences, causing them to join the site to see how the site actually works, play around, and report how well they liked the site on their own blogs. This increases the userbase, which of course increases growth, which leads to more blog posts and speeches about how fast the company is growing (same content, but different and much more impressive numbers every month, so the story only continues to get more and more interesting.) Eventually, word grows about it and regular folks start caring after hearing about the user numbers. Mainstream media becomes interested, causing more growth, and so on.
The approach for creating something for fellow hackers, growing the user base, and telling fellow hackers information about how well it's doing for marketing purposes is the approach taken by 37Signals, FogCreek (JoelOnSoftware), and some less known but up and coming startups. Creating something for fellow hackers has been described by Paul in his essays. One young company that I can think of right now that is good at this cycle is GitHub.
The key is to be the one who starts something, not the one who keeps reading and reading about others'.