How popular consumer apps got their first 1,000 users
Self-introduction
Hello, I'm Miyatake ({@tmiyatake1). I have worked as a venture capitalist based in the US for a Japanese VC firm, and I am currently the COO of a startup in LA. At Off Topic, I also host a podcast where I discuss D2C companies and explain the latest tech news. If you haven't subscribed yet, please check it out!
Introduction
I have received direct permission to translate the article "How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users" by former Airbnb growth lead Lenny Rachitsky. If you would like to read more of Lenny's content, please be sure to subscribe to his newsletter! I have also translated Lenny's "How to build a marketplace" article, so please take a look at that as well if you are interested!
There surprisingly weren't many articles that clearly summarized how consumer services acquire their first 1,000 users. Lenny's article is a dense report based on facts, gathered by actually interviewing founders, looking back at past interviews, and asking questions on Twitter. I would like to share the lessons from famous startups like Uber, TikTok, Tinder, and the recently talked-about Superhuman.
Summary
1. Initial growth for consumer apps can be divided into 7 strategies.
2. Product Hunt and Pinterest used multiple strategies, but most startups grow using just one. I haven't seen any cases yet where using three or more led to success.
3. The most popular strategy is to go directly to users, whether online or offline. Do things that don't scale.
4. To execute a strategy, it is important to narrowly define your target audience.
5. The methods for acquiring the first 1,000 users and the methods for reaching 10,000 are different.
The initial user acquisition strategies are the following 7:
1) Meet users directly offline
2) Meet users directly online
3) Invite friends
4) Create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
5) Leverage influencers
6) Leverage PR/media
7) Build a community
1. Meet users directly offline
Key Question
”Who is your initial target user, and where do they gather offline?”
University campuses: Tinder and DoorDash
“Tinder founding members Whitney Wolfe and Justin Mateen ran around the University of Southern California, introducing Tinder to fraternities and sororities. It went viral because it matched the need to connect with other singles and to know if someone was interested in you.” - Jeff Morris Jr.
“The initial version of DoorDash was a site called paloaltodelivery.com, which just had PDFs of restaurant menus in Palo Alto. CEO Tony and the DoorDash team printed flyers and handed them out at Stanford University. They wanted to see if there was demand for a $6 delivery fee. It started simply with a PDF menu site and flyers.” - Micah Moreau
Startup offices, train stations, and transportation hubs: Lyft and Uber
“We would knock on the doors of surrounding startup companies and hand out free Lyft coupons along with free cupcakes or donuts.” - Emily Castor and Benjamin Lauzier
“We used street teams quite a bit. We would go to various Caltrain stations in SF and hand out referral codes. Former CEO Travis himself went to the Twitter headquarters and handed out referral codes to employees. This later became Uber's global ambassador program.” — Andrew Chen
Shopping Malls: Snapchat
“Snapchat CEO Evan started showing it to people one by one, teaching them how to use it, and explaining why it was fun. He would even download the app for them. He did whatever it took to acquire users. He would go to shopping malls and hand out Snapchat flyers. He would ask people at the mall, 'Do you want to send a disappearing photo?' and he was often turned down.” - Billy Gallagher (from How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, The Snapchat Story)
Neighborhood HOA (Home Owner Association): Nextdoor
“At the time, the founding team knew it would be meaningless unless they found a place that would accept and validate the concept of a neighborhood social network. Choosing the right location was crucial. That place was Lorelei. It was a small, intimate community and home to the oldest homeowners association in California. Since there was already a way for people to communicate within the community, we thought it would be a good fit for Nextdoor. We contacted the HOA board, and they were willing to listen.” - Sarah Leary
Craft Fairs: Etsy
“Etsy decided to go to craft fairs held all over the U.S. They went there to find sellers. They knew that sellers would drive buyers to the site, so it was important to lock in the sellers.” - Thales Teixeira
Apple Stores: Pinterest
“Honestly, I was doing some pretty desperate things. I would go into an Apple Store on my way home and set the computers on display to show the Pinterest page. Then I would walk a little bit behind them and say to others within earshot, 'Wow, this site called Pinterest is really buzzing.'” - Ben Silbermann
2. Meeting users directly online
Key Question
“Who are your initial target users, and where do they gather online?”
Hacker News: Dropbox
“Dropbox CEO Drew posted a simple product demo video to Hacker News in April 2007. The title was 'My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive.' He gathered his initial users with that video.” - John Popel
App Store: TikTok/Musical.ly
“At the time, there was a secret trick in the App Store. You could make the app name very long. And we knew that the App Store search engine weighted the app name more heavily than keywords. So, we made the app name 'make awesome music videos with all kinds of effects for Instagram, Facebook, Messenger,' and we started getting traffic from search.” - Alex Zhu
Product Hunt: Loom
“We acquired our first 3,000 users on the first day of Product Hunt and the day or two after. To get from 3,000 to 20,000 users, we looked for evangelists within the organizations where our initial users were and built one-on-one relationships. And after 20,000, we acquired them through a PM system ($5 credit for every colleague referred, up to $50).” - Shahed Khan
Existing Online Communities: Netflix and Buffer
“To connect with users, we hired Corey Bridges to help with user acquisition. He had a talent for writing. Corey noticed that DVD owners were gathering on web forums and the like. He tried to infiltrate those communities. Corey didn't identify himself as a Netflix employee; he joined the conversations as a movie lover and made friends. From there, he gradually started promoting the wonderful site called Netflix to the moderators and most respected users in the community. He did a lot of seeding before the launch.” - Marc Randolph (from That Will Never Work)
“For the first nine months, I just kept writing guest blog posts (on blogs other than our own) and managed to acquire 100,000 users. It felt like a gradual climb. I wrote about 150 posts in nine months. Some didn't drive any traffic at all, and some only improved gradually. It took time to find the optimal posting frequency.” - Leo Widrich
3. Invite your friends
Key Question
“Do your friends fit your initial target audience?
If so, have you invited them to the service?”
Yelp
“We acquired our initial users by inviting our own network (mostly former PayPal colleagues). We asked our network to invite their friends. Since many of us had startup experience, we were used to helping each other out, so they invited many people. We reached about 1,000 users just from that. It is important not to underestimate the power of a single referral network, and it is crucial to think about the incentives and methods for getting people to invite others.” - Russel Simmons
Lyft
“Before we started the waitlist system, we sent invitations to friends via email.” - Emily Castor Warren
“Thefacebook.com launched on Wednesday, February 4, 2004. It was just a normal night in the dorm. When Mark Zuckerberg finished the site, he shared it with a few friends. Those friends recommended that he send it to an online email list of 300 people in Kirkland House, the dorm where he lived. A dozen or so joined, and by then, word of the site had already spread to other dorms. By the end of the night, everyone in the room was just watching the number of registered users. Within 24 hours, 1,200 to 1,500 people had registered.” - Dustin Moskovitz (from New Yorker)
Quora
“When Quora launched in January 2010, its users were mainly high school and college friends of Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. Thanks to that, if you look at early Quora information, there was a lot of information about good restaurants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Cheever grew up. We added a feature to invite others to the site to increase the number of users.” - from Wired
“LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman had successful friends and connections join during the early stages of the product. He understood that the quality of initial users is important for building an aspirational brand. Successful companies and people are always looking for the next talent to hire, so if we hadn't included successful people from the beginning, the company wouldn't have succeeded.” - Keith Rabois
Slack
“I begged friends working at other companies to try it out and give me feedback. We acquired our first 6 to 10 companies this way.” - Stewart Butterfield
“When we launched the app, I emailed all my friends. At first, no one understood the value of the service, but one small group kept using it. They didn't look like early adopters; they were friends and acquaintances I grew up with. They used it as part of their lives, uploading photos of their homes and food.” - Ben Silbermann
4. Creating Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)
Key Question
・Is it a product that relies on User Generated Content (UGC)? You should consider making the initial community curated.
・Does it have strong corporate value? In that case, you should consider a waitlist.
・Is it a social product? In that case, you should consider having existing users invite new users.
Restrict/Curate the initial community: Instagram, Pinterest, Clubhouse
"Watching Clubhouse's private TestFlight is interesting.
・Curation (quality assurance)
・Restrictions/Invite-only (FOMO: Fear of Missing Out)
・Rapid improvements/updates (no need for App Store review process)
・Initial users are referrals from trusted networks" - Todd Goldberg
"When we were prototyping and validating, it was good to give it to people with many Twitter followers. Moreover, the number of followers in a certain community was important. That community was the designer and online web design community. I thought the photo and visual elements we were focusing on would appeal most to this community. Thanks to them sharing it on Twitter, others started asking, 'When will this launch and when can I use it?', and that was the timing we launched." - Kevin Systrom
"Pinterest was an invite-only community at first. The initial users were design bloggers that Silbermann reached out to. He taught those he reached out to only to invite people with unique ideas and creative individuals. That's how it continued to grow on an invite basis until 2012." - Entrepreneur from
Pre-registration/Waitlist: Mailbox, Robinhood, Clubhouse, Superhuman, Pinterest
"When the iPhone email management app Mailbox was released, 700,000 users were already on the waitlist. This was to avoid putting an abnormal burden on Mailbox's servers and as a marketing strategy to increase demand." - Darrell Etherington
"During Superhuman's first year, we published a landing page while we were still developing. We spent just two hours building a minimal, crappy landing page using Squarespace. We only allowed email addresses to be entered on the landing page. And when an email address was entered, two questions were automatically sent:
1. Which email browser do you use?
2. What are your frustrations with email?" - Rahul Vohra
"When we released Robinhood, we didn't expect the initial site to go viral at all. So we put in simple copy, a button to register, and allowed people to enter their email address to join the waitlist. And we displayed what number they were on the waitlist. We were preparing the waitlist on Friday night before the press release. The next day, Saturday, I opened Google Analytics and saw about 600 concurrent users. When I looked at what happened, most of the users were coming from Hacker News. I looked at Hacker News and Robinhood was posted in third place." - Business Insider from
Invite-only from existing users: Spotify
"Spotify launched its beta version in 2008. It proceeded as invite-only until the official launch. This invite system was key to Spotify's initial growth. It allowed us to control Spotify's growth and gave the service more viral elements. Users were initially able to invite 5 friends." - TNW from
5. Utilizing influencers
Key Question
"Who are the influencers in your target demographic, and how can you get them to talk about your product?"
"The figure below is the graph of the initial launch. The first mention of Twitter on the internet was Evan Williams' blog on July 13th, but you can see that there were quite a few registrations the day before. And with Om Malik's post, 250 people registered the next day. This was when there were only about 600 people. Based on Evan's popularity and Om's recommendation, we were able to create a situation that would buzz initially." - Pete Warden
Product Hunt
"When I found an influencer, I or Nathan would send a personal email, link to articles in PandoDaily or Fast Company where Product Hunt appeared in the press, and explain our story. It was a manual process, but it was a good way to recruit good contributors and created a situation where it was easier to get feedback." - Ryan Hoover
"The founders of Instagram carefully selected their initial users. They chose good photographers, especially designers with high Twitter follower counts. You could call that initial user base an influencer campaign that established the first tone and promoted the first Instagram to produce high-quality content. Jack Dorsey was Instagram's best salesperson. At first, I was shocked that his investment was going to an app other than Burbn, but I soon liked Instagram more than Burbn. And when Instagram launched on October 6, 2010, it went viral immediately thanks to Jack Dorsey sharing it. It became the number one camera app in Apple's App Store." - Sarah Frier (from No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
6. Leveraging PR and Media
Key Question
"What is a new, interesting, and unique story that you can pitch to the press and media?"
Superhuman
"Using the press well means tapping into a zeitgeist moment. In our case, it was when Mailbox was shutting down. I wrote a widely read article on how to survive M&A, which I wrote in conjunction with the shutdown of Mailbox. I posted it on Medium, but it was also republished on qz.com. I was able to tap into a zeitgeist moment. It took four full days in total: three days focused solely on writing the article, and one day spent sharing it with various people. But in those four days, we got 5,000 sign-ups." - Rahul Vohra
Product Hunt
"We gained awareness by writing guest posts for tech media, like the FastCompany article. Early on, it was effective to use the press and media to increase sign-ups. The people who read TechCrunch were the same people who looked at Product Hunt. Furthermore, I made sure to leak information about good products launching on Product Hunt to reporter acquaintances. I sent products tailored to the reporters' interests, had them write articles about them, and had them link to Product Hunt. Moreover, that gave more recognition to creators and early-stage companies." - Ryan Hoover
Airbnb
"The turning point for Airbnb was the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) held in Denver, Colorado. The Airbnb founding members knew that more than four times the event's capacity would be attending, and they knew that would increase the demand for room rentals. It was easy to get people to offer up their rooms, but because they had no name recognition, it was difficult to get people to stay in those rooms. To solve that, they first approached bloggers with small audiences. It might seem counterintuitive, but they felt that by having small bloggers post about Airbnb, larger media outlets would feel the need to cover it. That accelerated, and eventually, NBC and CBS, which broadcast nationwide, were interviewing the Airbnb founders. The DNC was good for Airbnb, but it only lasted a week. When the founders were sitting in the kitchen wondering how they could maximize the impact from the event, they came up with the idea of selling cereal to turn a profit. Both were designers and graduates of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. They came up with fake cereals, 'Obama O's, the Cereal of Change' and 'Cap'n McCain's, a Maverick in Every Box.' They designed the box art themselves and asked students at UC Berkeley to print the boxes cheaply. Since the boxes were printed as flat rectangles, they had to cut and hand-assemble each one. The founding members sent the boxes to various tech bloggers and had them write articles about them. After that, they sold them for $40 a box. Obama O's sold so well that they started including Cap'n McCain's for free." - from
Pando
Slack
"We didn't call the beta version a beta version because we thought it would make the service seem not very good. We leveraged the team's past experience to execute a press strategy. That caused the requests to use Slack to pour in. It went up to 8,000 people on the first day and 15,000 people two weeks later. The power of the media at launch is strong." - Stewart Butterfield
"Kevin Systrom says that not using a PR firm and contacting the press and media directly was the right strategy. Pitching from a good product and a passionate founder makes for good press and articles. I contacted anyone who I thought would like the product without hesitation. That worked well. Many people told me there was no point in contacting the New York Times, but the NYT didn't just talk to us, they came to meet us in person. And on the same day we launched in October 2010, the press came out, and the burden on the servers was incredible." - from TNW
7. Building a community before launch
Key Question
"Can you build a community now that you can leverage later?"
Product Hunt
"Product Hunt started as a newsletter using a newsletter tool called Linkydink. While developing Product Hunt, I shared mocks with people who would contribute to the MVP version and people related to the product to get feedback. This wasn't just for customer development; I wanted the people I shared it with to feel like they were contributing to the product and were part of it (and they actually were contributing). Five days later, the MVP was complete. I emailed the Product Hunt URL to the supporters and asked them not to share it with others. Because the supporters felt they had contributed to the development, they immediately became attached to the product. That's how we got our first 30 users. By the end of the week, we had gathered 100 people, so I thought we could go public." - Ryan Hoover
Stack Overflow
"Stack Overflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood had large followings due to their past work. They invited their respective communities to the private beta. Since it looks awkward to have no content at the start, the founders created content themselves before sending out invitations." - Jon
Summary
The following 7 strategies were used to acquire the first 1,000 users
1) Meet users in person offline
2) Meet users in person online
3) Invite friends
4) Create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
5) Leverage influencers
6) Leverage PR and media
7) Build a community
Questions to ask yourself to decide which strategy to focus on
1) Who are your initial target users, and where do they gather offline?
2) Who are your initial target users, and where do they gather online?
3) Do your friends fit the initial target demographic? If so, have you invited them to the service?
4) Is your product reliant on User Generated Content (UGC)? You should consider making the initial community curated.
5) Does it have strong brand value? If so, you should consider a waitlist.
6) Is it a social product? If so, you should consider having existing users invite new users.
7) Who are the influencers in your target demographic, and how can you get them to talk about your product?
8) What is a new, interesting, and unique story you can pitch to the press and media?
9) Can you build a community now that you can leverage later?
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Written by Lenny Rachitsky | Translated by Tetsuro (@tmiyatake1) | Edited by Miki (@mikirepo)