[HN Gopher] How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1k users
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How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1k users
Author : tacon
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-10-10 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lennysnewsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lennysnewsletter.com)
| SAS24 wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
| Lamad123 wrote:
| Not necessarily "fake"!! This can almost be considered as some
| form of dogfooding!
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Interestingly enough, the video is from Udacity - which also
| benefits from hype
| faridelnasire wrote:
| Would love a similar article for b2b saas!
| bnajdecki wrote:
| Me too!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Every single one have fake data, guaranteed. I have yet to see a
| public facinh site I worked on that didn't have some fake data.
|
| Some outrageously fake, like x10 times the user count.
| croes wrote:
| Doesn't this consideration involve a lot of survivorship bias?
| Closi wrote:
| I guess any study of what the 'survivors' did could inevitably
| be accused of survivorship bias, but IMO the framing of the
| article itself manages to avoid it, it's mostly just listing
| the growth strategies that these companies had and stays away
| from any claims that others will be successful by implementing
| them.
| croes wrote:
| If we had 1,000,000 apps using the same tactics but in the
| end only 10 get successful would think the tactics had
| anything to do with the success of the 10? You have to look
| at the losers too.
| blowski wrote:
| I thought of it more as a bunch of ideas, than some kind of
| scientific evidence of what works.
| passivate wrote:
| How do we know when its 'a lot' versus 'a little bit'?
| Lamad123 wrote:
| How about gmail?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Definitely FOMO with their limited invites. I'm not sure what
| other strategies they employed beyond seeding initial users and
| getting them to invite friends to what was a superior service
| (1-2 orders of magnitude more e-mail storage than offered by
| just about anyone else, and for free). IIRC, I got my GMail
| address off an invite from a high-school colleague.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| IIRC, they kickstarted it by having their employees hand out
| invite codes after the internal beta had ironed out the worst
| bugs and most Google employees switched over for their internal
| communication, and then these users could also create invite
| codes... and given that Gmail offered a whopping 1GB of free
| storage whereas common providers offered sometimes only single-
| digit megabyte quotas, people were going nuts for invites.
| dim13 wrote:
| All 7 ways boil down to "hype", as hard as you can.
| greenail wrote:
| I think they missed "create fake users" which is less likely to
| be admitted but likely a viable strategy. Are there any good
| studies on how fake users influence your ability to acquire new
| users?
| cronix wrote:
| Where would dating sites be without bots?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Not just that, there was one dating site that I joined after
| a friend of mine recommended it to me, and I soon realized
| that said site was "recycling" direct messages. What I mean
| is, they took real messages that their users had sent to
| other people on the site and they sent these messages to new
| users. In this way they roped people into paying for premium
| so that you can respond to messages. And canceling the
| membership was really difficult too. And when I went to their
| terms and conditions I saw that they had sneakily put in the
| ToC, that no one reads, that the site was "for entertainment"
| and some additional wording, in order to be able to defend
| what they were doing. At the end of the day it's basically
| fraud IMO, and super scummy behavior even if they are able to
| get away with it legally.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Anecdata, but when starting a web forum years and years ago, I
| had to post regularly as a dozen sock puppet users to kick
| start it. Nobody wants to be the first, and 99 percent of
| people just lurk.
| rasjani wrote:
| I've been a soundsystem mc and organizing parties since 97. I
| have noticed similar behavior on the patrons attending.
| People either need to get tipsy enough or someone else has to
| have the courage and be the first one dancing. Now, even if
| it's not my show, I tend to be early on dancing and that
| usually opens up "queue".. ratio of lurkers is ofcourse high
| but the genre is more geared towards people coming to
| actually dance.
| mprovost wrote:
| Ah yes the classic Dancing Guy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ
| felipemnoa wrote:
| This is so incredible! Not sure if real or not but it
| seems plausible as to how movements are created. Very
| illuminating if true. Hope to apply it in future
| ventures.
| cronix wrote:
| This would have been gold if it was narrated by Steve
| Irwin/Crocodile Hunter. I felt like I was watching a
| nature documentary.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| For people who want to avoid YouTube, the transcript is
| https://sive.rs/ff and the video is
| https://sive.rs/file/DancingGuy-ff.m4v.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I was expecting cops to arrest him for being stoned.
|
| Also, YT recommended this video:
| https://youtu.be/SA7bKo4HRTg
|
| It might be the best 5 minutes of your day
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| In case anyone else wants to know about it before
| investing their time:
|
| The YouTube video title is "Funniest Leadership Speech
| ever!"
|
| It's a little humerous, but I didn't hear anything about
| leadership - the word was never even said by the speaker!
| The speaker ended by saying "...and that's where I
| learned where I'm from." So yeah... not about leadership
| at all. Decent speech, but bad YouTube title. There
| wasn't any lessons or anything, just a story about the
| guy when he was a kid.
| skunkworker wrote:
| Reddit did this in the early days
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
| xwdv wrote:
| What you will learn is that the biggest consumer apps get their
| first 1k users through gray-hat tactics. And if you're not
| willing to do the same you will not beat them.
| 101008 wrote:
| I think the majority of them are known or not surpsiring at all,
| but there are a few ones that are interseting, like TikTok's
| hacking* of App Store title length.
|
| * I know it isn't hacking, but I couldn't find a better word?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Please elaborate
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It's in the article.
| exolymph wrote:
| In short, find people and pitch them. Repeatedly. It's not
| complicated, just labor intensive. The complicated part is
| creating something compelling to pitch.
| blowski wrote:
| Personally, I'd do anything to avoid pitching someone, so that
| bit is very complicated for me.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| Same, it's the reason why I will have to partner with someone
| with that set of skills for my next SaaS or app.
| polote wrote:
| Never understood the point of those articles. Do you think you
| can grasp the market strategy of a startup in two sentences ? For
| Dropbox, they say "Drew created a simple video, demoing the
| product, and published it on April 2007 on Hacker News" and
| that's how they got their first 1k users. I doubt it (the product
| was not even released at that point, it is explained in the
| source).
|
| It is the same kind of articles that try to unbundle popular apps
| and say that any startup is the result of the unbundling of a
| previous company.
|
| People invent a concept and try to make every thing that happen
| fits this concept. And then they say, look this concept it
| awesome even if it is bullshit
| [deleted]
| vincentmarle wrote:
| The problem is not getting your first 1k users (anyone with
| enough time and money can do that). The real challenge is how to
| make a sticky product that people care enough about to tell their
| friends.
| jonplackett wrote:
| One of my favourite stories was Paypal - they spent tonnes of
| their money buying things on eBay and demanding to only pay with
| PayPal.
| mike_d wrote:
| MySpace: The parent company (eUniverse) was a prolific spammer
| and blasted fake invites to people who had signed up for their
| dating sites.
|
| Reddit: As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, they created tons
| of fake accounts to show a community.
|
| TikTok: Ironically, they launched the platform by having
| employees spam other platforms with branded videos.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| LinkedIn: got access to your email contacts list, and spammed
| everyone in it, multiple times. (This is the reason I do not
| use LinkedIn, is I do not support a company that is founded on
| sending out spam).
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Yup, they got sued for it too:
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/linkedin-class-action-
| email...
| yholio wrote:
| I will never ever create a LinkedIn account, the hard sell
| techniques, spam to my inbox and aggressiveness is so off-
| putting that I would rather eat my own barf. This whole
| company and its power users reeks to me from outside like a
| scene from Glengarry Glen Ross: a bunch of hustlers trying to
| fake-it-till-they-make-it, appear super-important and trump
| up their bogus businessperson profiles and pretend
| connections.
| joering2 wrote:
| Nathan Blecharczyk, co founder of AirBNB, and once on FBI 100
| wanted as a top spammer on US soil [1], also spin off AirBNB by
| posting unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful
| apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once
| people reply to these offers he auto-responded that the unit
| has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on
| AirBNB website. Super clever, super immoral, illegal?
|
| [1] https://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/airbnb-spam-allegations/
| [deleted]
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