How OnlyFans, Canva, Snapchat, Pinterest, and others got their first users...

I've been fascinated by the case studies (or more like frameworks) of how successful businesses started their journey. You know... to know how the successful guys cracked the code, created amazing things, and achieved some lvl of success.

Today I wanted to share a few of these. I also wrote more in-depth articles, with more strategies and psychology explained behind them.

OnlyFans

Make use of your previous experience

Timothy Stokely, the founder, previously had similar startups, like GlamGirls, GlamWorship, and Customs4U.

They were basically porn sites. They gave Stokely an experience (and networks) in the world of content for adults. The first creators on OnlyFans came from that source. Stokely reached out to porn influencers and encouraged them to move to OnlyFans.

Twitter integration from day 1

OnlyFans accounts had automatic Twitter integration. Creators could share their referral links easily on Twitter. Their fans could see it immediately. It worked seamlessly since day 1 of OnlyFans and generated a great boost to the traffic.

Loose censorship

OnlyFans got so popular thanks to its loose censorship policy. Porn stars were able to share their content that would get quickly banned in most of the other places.

Link to the article with more details

Canva

MVP

Melanie Perkins was teaching students about design. She noticed that students had a huge need for a simple graphic design tool. She wanted to make it easier to create visuals. Photoshop was too intimidating for most users.

So she created "Fusion Books" which would enable schools to design and create high-quality yearbooks for students.

Perkins and Obrecht made some cold calls to schools to pitch the idea of Fusion Books. Obrecht modulated his voice when the schools wanted to speak with the project manager. They have reached 400 schools. They even sent some free samples of the designs and it worked.

Spreading the word through conferences and people

To promote Canva, Perkins kept going to as many conferences and meet-ups as possible. She attended conferences for bloggers, designers, and social media marketers. She pitched Canva to the attendees.

Perkins and Obrecht reached out to popular designers and graphic design influencers. They asked them to talk about Canva and recommend it to their followers and fans.

Building a waitlist with the help of a high-profile tech influencer

Perkins and Obrecht built a community around Canva and created a waitlist. It was all before Canva even started.

50,000 users have signed up on their waitlist before Canva's public launch. It got to 150,000 pretty fast thanks to a tech influencer, Guy Kawasaki. One of Kawasaki’s employees was using Canva and made him get interested in the app.

Link to the article with more details

Reddit

Faking traffic

Reddit founders had a “chicken & egg” problem. No users to create a content = no users to see the content.The founders created several fake accounts and started posting various links. They kept doing this for months until they got some real traction.

Once the first real users started joining Reddit, fake accounts started to disappear. People reported their “odd activity” and the fake accounts got phased out.

Making it look bigger

At the beginning, Reddit’s creators put all users in one place to create a “feeling” that the platform is “crowded”. One group with 100 users looks much better than a group with 10 people.

Users generated content

3 years after the launch, Reddit users could submit their own subreddits. This feature gave steady growth at the beginning

Link to the article with more details

Pinterest

Word of mouth and first users

The first Pinterest users were from the creator’s hometown, Des Moines. Ben, the founder was organizing meet-ups at local boutiques and handed out invites to the attendees. The word spread further within smaller groups and clubs. The First 3,000 users appeared within 3 months. Most of these people were involved in some DIY and handicraft stuff.

Invite-only & „Pin it forward” campaign

The first 2 years Pinterest was an invite-only platform.

Ben has partnered with SF Girl by Bay, an SF-based blogger, to create an inspirational pinboard on „what home means to you”.

Then, other bloggers, mostly publishing about DIY or handicraft, were invited to the platform and to participate in the campaign, sharing their take on the subjects through sharing their pinboard with their readers. And those bloggers had invites to give away.

That campaign gathered 300 bloggers and 10 of them published each week on a topic and linked back to pinboard.

That was simply marketing Pinterest through community leaders.

Link to the article with more details

HEY (email)

Personal brand and Twitter

Before HEY email Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, founded the Basecamp. They both had hundreds of thousands of followers on their Twitter accounts.

They tweeted about the app before they launched it, and kept gradually letting people onto their waitlist.

Waitlist

Fried and David used it to pump up the hype around Hey email. One week after the app's launch, they already got more than 100,000 people.

Link to the article with more details

WhatsApp

First users among friends

Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s founder, attended weekly meetings at his friend’s place. There were a lot of local Russians, and Koum pitched WhatsApp to them. It gave him the first dozens of users.

Abusing App Store loopholes

App Store didn't have many apps at that time. Koum discovered that the “What's New” section could be easily abused.

By constantly changing the name of WhatsApp on App Store it kept the app at the top of the App Store's "What's New" list. This little cheat made WhatsApp stay there for as long as the loop didn’t get fixed by Apple. It was enough to collect the first 1,000 users.

Snapchat

Pitching the app

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the founders of Snapchat, pitched their app (called then “Picaboo”) in their community:

• they handed out flyers,

• they were giving tutorials,

• they were talking to people 1-on-1 about the app,

• and even reached out to some journalists.

It didn’t get them much popularity, though. They got only 127 users, and all of them were their friends.

Available for iPads

Snapchat started to grow when Spiegel and Murphy made it available for iPads. The target audience was teenagers and students. But, not many of them had iPhones at that time. iPads were more common.

Murphy took a job as a coder in a company selling iPads and learned their system. So, he thought Snapchat should be available not only for iPhones but also for iPads. That slowly took the user count to 1,000.

Tapping into high schoolers

• Snapchat got 127 users in the first 6 months - mostly founders' friends

• When after 6 months one of the founders’ Evan Spiegel's (the founder) mother told their teenage cousin about the snapchat, the app went instantly viral at a local high school in Southern California, and beyond.

• It gave teenagers an opportunity to exchange messages quickly and left no evidence.

• The app grew from 127 to 30k in 2 months

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Thant's all!

If you liked it, I have a Newsletter where I share viral marketing case studies, and cognitive biases