August 20, 2014 at 16:32How startups like Dropbox, Airbnb, Groupon and others got their first users
- Transfer
This post is a translation of an article from reddit and is a squeeze of the most interesting facts about what steps famous startups took in the first months of their existence to attract the first users. Some of the tips in the article may seem obvious, but in general, the selection of stories seemed rather interesting to me, and therefore I wanted to share it.
Under the cut are the stories of companies such as Dropbox, Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Groupon, Tinder and Airbnb.
In 2008, Dropbox actively fought to attract new users. They launched the campaign on Adsense, but to no avail. For every $ 300 spent, they attracted one user paying $ 99 per product. After some time, Drew Houston and his team decided to try something else.
Drew made a simple four-minute video that showed how Dropbox works. The textual description of the service was not very impressive, and against its background the video worked amazingly. An important aspect worth mentioning was that the video was made specifically for the community to whom they were going to present. Drew was a member of Digg and knew what kind of things would be warmly received in this community. If you look closely, in the video there are many references to popular memes like reports on test plans (in the originalTPS report ) and Tom Cruise. There were a lot of jokes popular in the community, due to which I saw quickly hit the top. The next day, Dropbox already had 70,000 new registrations.
Another Dropbox solution that we can apply in the marketing of our own projects was the provision of additional services for social activity. Dropbox launched an extensive campaign during which you could talk about the service on Facebook and Twitter and get an extra 128 MB of disk space for it. This was what the users really wanted. As a result, 2.8 million invitations were sent in the first 30 days.
A more complete history and some details can be found here .
Quora and reddit solved the “empty site = no users / no users = empty site” problem in a similar way. The founders of both services spent the first months filling them with content on their own.
In the case of Quora, the creators simply asked and answered many questions from their own accounts. Reddit had a more interesting approach. Instead of just using their own accounts, the founders of the service created fake users so that everything looked like links were published by different people. In the link publication form, the third field was “Username”. According to Steve Hoffman, co-founder of reddit, several months passed before there was no need to publish the news yourself in order to fill them with the main page.
At first, they also tried to keep all users in one place. Reddit had no subsections at that time, and Quora was mainly focused on technology. Instead of sharing users, they tried to keep everyone in one place, creating the feeling that the community is larger than it really is.
Quora and reddit report .
Foursquare took the old idea of location-based applications and added some interesting features that really attracted attention, such as badges, for example. The ability to become a "mayor", that is, a person who is mainly celebrated in one, specific place, quickly fell in love with users and became a habit.
Foursquare also provided facility owners with extensive user experience. After a business appeared on a Foursquare page, the owners had the opportunity to interact with users who were tagged in their establishments - whether it was a desire to just chat with the most active visitors or reward such people with something.
And the last, most significant component of Foursquare’s growth was their strategy of moving from city to city. Each time, expanding into a new city, they acquired a huge number of new users, thanks to the “word of mouth” effect (“did you hear that foursquare has earned in our city?”) And local media coverage.
Report on Foursquare (English) .
I really like the story behind the creation of Groupon, as this is a great example of what we talk so much about in this subsection of reddit ( r / Entrepreneur ). Start on the local market and make the smallest sustainable product.
Groupon started as locally as possible. Its creators walked around the building in which they rented an office, and invited people to register. Their first share? Pizza for half the price in the restaurant on the ground floor. From here came the first 500 users.
After that, they settled on local products and services. Due to the fact that large companies like Amazon or Wal-Mart were able to negotiate at very low prices, even the largest group shopping sites could not compete with them in the sale of things like televisions or phones. Instead, Groupon focused on the unique products of local businesses. Many of these small institutions did not have any marketing at all, so Groupon's proposals were tempting, which allowed the startup to bargain at much more attractive prices.
Following the MVP StrategyAndrew Mason did not want to waste time developing a complete platform around the Groupon idea. Instead of building a large team, such as the one he had in his first venture business, he brought several people together and started a WordPress blog where this team posted suggestions. Coupons were sent to personal emails and no one in the company had a clear understanding of their role or position. They spent their first months looking at how many users they could attract, as quickly as possible, to test the validity of the idea. And only when it became clear that they had groped for something big, they began to deal with the business side of the company.
One last thing: Groupon focused on offers that were social in nature. They staged promotions for cafes, restaurants and movie theaters. All these establishments belong to the type of places where you invite other people; this naturally led to the website becoming popular.
Report on Groupon (English) .
In Tinder, there are 2 key points. It started as a local service and was deadly simple.
The application did an excellent job, taking as a basis the old idea of online dating and completely reworking it. Instead of groups of people and a search system, an image of one person just appeared in front of you and you leafed him left or right. By and large, this is the very idea that made HotOrNot and Facemash services popular, but ported to mobile devices. Such mechanics helped solve the problem that users often encounter on traditional dating sites. If you are an attractive girl, then you are inundated with messages. If you are not the luckiest young man, then most of your messages go unanswered. Due to the fact that in Tinder you cannot send messages to people who did not like you in response, both of these problems are largely resolved.
And no less interesting, Tinder also started as a local service. For such applications, having 50 users concentrated in one place is much better than having 5,000 users scattered from each other. My favorite part of the Tinder strategy: they had exclusive parties at the University of Southern California. To get on it, you had to install Tinder on your phone. You can imagine how many conversations around the application they received as a result.
Report on Tinder (English) .
Also of interest is the Airbnb strategy. Unlike reddit and Quora, an artificial proposal approach would not work for them. Therefore, they acted somewhat differently. They used for growth a platform on which there were already a lot of offers about free houses: Craiglist. A lot of people who advertised their homes on Craiglist received weird emails from a "big Airbnb fan."
Each email came from a semi-anonymous Gmail account, like Jill D. The trick was that these messages worked. Many people began to advertise their homes on both sites, which solved the problem with users who came in search of housing and found only an empty website. Finding offers for a site like Airbnb was much more difficult.
As a note, another thing that helped them at the start was to walk around their users ’homes and help with photographing. They went from $ 200 a week to $ 400 after they updated the site with new photos for each offer. Perhaps this does not look so impressive against the background of the money that Airbnb makes today.
Airbnb Report .
The whole point of this collection is to look at what startups who have become successful do and decide which of these we can apply in our own marketing. Here are a few key points to consider:
Under the cut are the stories of companies such as Dropbox, Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Groupon, Tinder and Airbnb.
Dropbox grew from 5,000 to 75,000 registrations in one night
In 2008, Dropbox actively fought to attract new users. They launched the campaign on Adsense, but to no avail. For every $ 300 spent, they attracted one user paying $ 99 per product. After some time, Drew Houston and his team decided to try something else.
Drew made a simple four-minute video that showed how Dropbox works. The textual description of the service was not very impressive, and against its background the video worked amazingly. An important aspect worth mentioning was that the video was made specifically for the community to whom they were going to present. Drew was a member of Digg and knew what kind of things would be warmly received in this community. If you look closely, in the video there are many references to popular memes like reports on test plans (in the originalTPS report ) and Tom Cruise. There were a lot of jokes popular in the community, due to which I saw quickly hit the top. The next day, Dropbox already had 70,000 new registrations.
Another Dropbox solution that we can apply in the marketing of our own projects was the provision of additional services for social activity. Dropbox launched an extensive campaign during which you could talk about the service on Facebook and Twitter and get an extra 128 MB of disk space for it. This was what the users really wanted. As a result, 2.8 million invitations were sent in the first 30 days.
A more complete history and some details can be found here .
How reddit and Quora solved the chicken and egg problem (lack of content and users)
Quora and reddit solved the “empty site = no users / no users = empty site” problem in a similar way. The founders of both services spent the first months filling them with content on their own.
In the case of Quora, the creators simply asked and answered many questions from their own accounts. Reddit had a more interesting approach. Instead of just using their own accounts, the founders of the service created fake users so that everything looked like links were published by different people. In the link publication form, the third field was “Username”. According to Steve Hoffman, co-founder of reddit, several months passed before there was no need to publish the news yourself in order to fill them with the main page.
At first, they also tried to keep all users in one place. Reddit had no subsections at that time, and Quora was mainly focused on technology. Instead of sharing users, they tried to keep everyone in one place, creating the feeling that the community is larger than it really is.
Quora and reddit report .
Foursquare
Foursquare took the old idea of location-based applications and added some interesting features that really attracted attention, such as badges, for example. The ability to become a "mayor", that is, a person who is mainly celebrated in one, specific place, quickly fell in love with users and became a habit.
Foursquare also provided facility owners with extensive user experience. After a business appeared on a Foursquare page, the owners had the opportunity to interact with users who were tagged in their establishments - whether it was a desire to just chat with the most active visitors or reward such people with something.
And the last, most significant component of Foursquare’s growth was their strategy of moving from city to city. Each time, expanding into a new city, they acquired a huge number of new users, thanks to the “word of mouth” effect (“did you hear that foursquare has earned in our city?”) And local media coverage.
Report on Foursquare (English) .
Groupon began its journey with a local MVP strategy (minimum viable product)
I really like the story behind the creation of Groupon, as this is a great example of what we talk so much about in this subsection of reddit ( r / Entrepreneur ). Start on the local market and make the smallest sustainable product.
Groupon started as locally as possible. Its creators walked around the building in which they rented an office, and invited people to register. Their first share? Pizza for half the price in the restaurant on the ground floor. From here came the first 500 users.
After that, they settled on local products and services. Due to the fact that large companies like Amazon or Wal-Mart were able to negotiate at very low prices, even the largest group shopping sites could not compete with them in the sale of things like televisions or phones. Instead, Groupon focused on the unique products of local businesses. Many of these small institutions did not have any marketing at all, so Groupon's proposals were tempting, which allowed the startup to bargain at much more attractive prices.
Following the MVP StrategyAndrew Mason did not want to waste time developing a complete platform around the Groupon idea. Instead of building a large team, such as the one he had in his first venture business, he brought several people together and started a WordPress blog where this team posted suggestions. Coupons were sent to personal emails and no one in the company had a clear understanding of their role or position. They spent their first months looking at how many users they could attract, as quickly as possible, to test the validity of the idea. And only when it became clear that they had groped for something big, they began to deal with the business side of the company.
One last thing: Groupon focused on offers that were social in nature. They staged promotions for cafes, restaurants and movie theaters. All these establishments belong to the type of places where you invite other people; this naturally led to the website becoming popular.
Report on Groupon (English) .
Tinder
In Tinder, there are 2 key points. It started as a local service and was deadly simple.
The application did an excellent job, taking as a basis the old idea of online dating and completely reworking it. Instead of groups of people and a search system, an image of one person just appeared in front of you and you leafed him left or right. By and large, this is the very idea that made HotOrNot and Facemash services popular, but ported to mobile devices. Such mechanics helped solve the problem that users often encounter on traditional dating sites. If you are an attractive girl, then you are inundated with messages. If you are not the luckiest young man, then most of your messages go unanswered. Due to the fact that in Tinder you cannot send messages to people who did not like you in response, both of these problems are largely resolved.
And no less interesting, Tinder also started as a local service. For such applications, having 50 users concentrated in one place is much better than having 5,000 users scattered from each other. My favorite part of the Tinder strategy: they had exclusive parties at the University of Southern California. To get on it, you had to install Tinder on your phone. You can imagine how many conversations around the application they received as a result.
Report on Tinder (English) .
Airbnb used a different platform (Craiglist) to attract first users
Also of interest is the Airbnb strategy. Unlike reddit and Quora, an artificial proposal approach would not work for them. Therefore, they acted somewhat differently. They used for growth a platform on which there were already a lot of offers about free houses: Craiglist. A lot of people who advertised their homes on Craiglist received weird emails from a "big Airbnb fan."
I am writing to you because you have one of the best offers on Craiglist in the Tahoe area, and I would like to advise you to publish it on the largest rental site on the Internet, Airbnb. The site already has 3 million visits per month!
Each email came from a semi-anonymous Gmail account, like Jill D. The trick was that these messages worked. Many people began to advertise their homes on both sites, which solved the problem with users who came in search of housing and found only an empty website. Finding offers for a site like Airbnb was much more difficult.
As a note, another thing that helped them at the start was to walk around their users ’homes and help with photographing. They went from $ 200 a week to $ 400 after they updated the site with new photos for each offer. Perhaps this does not look so impressive against the background of the money that Airbnb makes today.
Airbnb Report .
Instead of a conclusion
The whole point of this collection is to look at what startups who have become successful do and decide which of these we can apply in our own marketing. Here are a few key points to consider:
- Make a video that will explain the essence of your service, if only the text does not cope with this task. If you’re making a video, make sure it’s focused on the audience you’d like to present it to.
- The best way to make your new community not resemble a ghost town is to fill it yourself. To use the reddit approach with fake users or to follow the Quora path, forming a team of active participants at the start, depends on what kind of community you are building. In the case of a service like Quora, where the author’s reputation and qualifications are important, an approach with fake users would never work.
- Do other services have a user base that you could access? Try using the Airbnb approach and see if you can bring some of them to your website. But at the same time, it is important to remember: what you offer should be better than existing analogues in one way or another.
- In many of these stories, locality is key. It's much easier and cheaper to focus on a subset of people than trying to get everyone.