I studied how 100 startups got their first users. It's interesting how so many startups take entirely different paths, and yet manage to be equally successful.
Communities/social platforms
Reddit's story is quite popular - they faked users and activity on the site for quite sometime till organic traction caught on. Quora on the other hand grew primarily through the high level connections that the founders built.
Even between communities of similar audiences, ProductHunt took the organic route of building a collaborative newsletter till it became big enough. Indiehackers, you can say, was from influencers. They interviewed people who the target group finds inspirational. Growth came from organic shares on HN and Twitter.
B2B products
Customer support platforms - Some used outbound campaigns while the others were inbound.
Website Builders - Another interesting comparison is between Shopify and PageCloud - two website builders albeit different TG.
Content websites
Dating's next
There are businesses that gained from similar strategies despite being completely different from one another.
What I learned is that there is no one way to grow a product. Enjoy each of these stories and pick something interesting from everything to build a growth plan for your own business
You can check the individual stories of all these startups here: https://bridgeurl.com/first-users
If you are on Twitter, please check out my tweet thread on this topic : https://twitter.com/anand_sriniv/status/1278641048106029057
Nice post @hubbion. Thanks for sharing these insights!
Thanks @gordon. I'm glad you liked it.
Great read! I also read your post from a few days back with the 100 startup links that you shared :)
Ah you remember! Thanks Rasmus.
This was a great resource! Thank you so much
I'm glad you liked it, Bree.
This is awesome!, I've read a similar one https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got
Some of them are very funny too.