Post on Medial

To all new startup founders, here's how 7 different startups hustled for their first customers. If you're feeling disheartened, I hope their stories will inspire you to keep on going! 1 & 2: Tinder & Alibaba - Physically travelled to their first users Crucial to Tinder success was then CMO Whitney Wolfe ideas for building an early user base. She planned a tour that would take her to prominent college campuses around the country. Alibaba "brute forced" it's success by visiting factories one by one Back in the early '00s, Jack Ma sent out a large sales force to fan out across the country, visiting one by one to show them how they could use Alibaba & Taobao to sell stuff online. 3 & 4: Quora and Reddit - seeded their sites with their own content Founders solved the chicken-and-egg problem by contributing the bulk of early content themselves Quora and Reddit are two of the largest online forums in existence today, but they were once ghost towns with the chicken-and-egg problem of "empty site = no users / no users = empty site". Quora co-founders D'Angelo, Cheever and Cox wrote most of the earliest questions and answers themselves. The first employees and beta testers then continued this trend, until the platform generated enough activity for them to stop. Reddit did the same, but it also created fake profiles. According co-founder Steve Huffman, it took several months before the front page would fill up organically without their submissions. 5: Dropbox - the biggest believers in word-of-mouth Dropbox launched shared folders and a massive referral campaign In April 2010 alone, Dropbox users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites. But on top of that, Dropbox itself was designed to encourage sharing. They introduced shared folders, a nifty feature that encouraged users to invite others to share access to folders. 6: Twitter - exploded their userbases at SXSW with guerrilla marketing SXSW 2007 - Twitter lived streamed the conference on huge plasma screens Co-founder Evan Williams decided to visualize the service on 60 inch plasma screens in the hallways, because "We knew hallways were where the action was". Twitter created an event-specific feature that allowed attendees to follow a handful of ambassadors. 7: Airbnb - shuttled from coast to coast to talk to their first users Founders went the extra mile for their earliest users Founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia acted on Paul Graham's advice in their Y Combinator days and "did things that didn't scale". Specifically, they went to NYC to acquire their earliest users, then followed up with them extensively. When New York took off, we flew back every weekend. We went door to door with cameras taking pictures of all these apartments to put them online. I lived in their living rooms. And home by home, block by block, communities started growing. And people would visit New York and bring the idea back with them to their city." - Brian Chesky, for The Atlantic