How to Get Your First 1,000 Users

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now onto the episode.

What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before hopping into the episode, I would love to hear from you. Shoot me an email, introduce yourself. There is nothing better than meeting my listeners and hearing what you're up to and what you're building. Now let's get to the episode. Today's read is by one of my favorite startup creators, Lenny Rachitsky, and the essay I'm about to share is one that I've probably read a dozen times. The essay is called How to Kickstart and Scale a Consumer Business, and it breaks down the 7 proven strategies to acquire your first 1,000 users as a B2C startup. I'm going to read through each of the strategies, share some examples that Lenny provides, and provide some of my own thoughts as I read along. So without further ado, let's hop into the episode. How to Kickstart and Scale a Consumer Business by Lenny Rachitsky. After reviewing the early growth strategies of more than 100 consumer companies, it turns out that there are really only 7 reliable ways to find your first 1,000 users. 1, reach out to friends and colleagues. 2, reach out to targeted strangers. 3, go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline. 4, enlist influencers paid or organically. 5, get press. 6, create viral content. And 7, get physical placement. For example, flyers, stickers, and signs. And then the next thing in the essay that Lenny shares is basically a graphic that he calls the kickstarting menu, and it breaks these 7 proven strategies into 3 buckets. The first bucket is pitching individuals, and under that bucket he puts friends and colleagues and targeted strangers. The second bucket is what he calls piggybacking, and And under that, he includes the strategies of going where they hang out and listing influencers and getting physical placement. And then the third bucket on the kickstarting menu is content, where he includes the strategy of getting press or creating viral content. One thing that I will touch on at the end, um, and I'll share based on Lenny's essay, is this fourth bucket, which he calls off-menu niche strategies. And so towards the end of the essay, Lenny will share and I will read 4 Niche strategies that are not as common but are proven to work for some consumer startups. Let's keep it going. Like with a menu, your job is to peruse this list, pick 2 or 3 items that seem appetizing, and try them. If something works, chow down. If not, try something else. Note, almost every startup finds the vast majority of their early growth from just 1 or 2 channels. Some see all of their early growth come from just a single channel. For example, Udemy and PR, Etsy and online and offline communities. Twitter and influencers. So my advice is to focus. Don't order everything on the menu. What I'll just share from my own experience with Morning Brew is basically a single tactic. One single tactic that I'll share later in this episode is what got us our first 10, 100, 1,000, and even first few thousand subscribers. And so I totally agree. Basically casting a wide net with marketing strategies early on, figuring out what works, and then focusing on that one thing that works and basically backing up the truck of your resources into that until it no longer works is the right way to go about things. Let's keep it going. How do you decide which tactic to pursue? To make your decision even easier, here's what I've found to be the 3 common archetypes of early startup growth. The typical path to first 1,000 users for consumer startups is one of 3 things. First, reach out to friends and colleagues. Example, email them, post on social media, or call them. Second, go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline. So for example, forums, Product Hunt, college campuses, Craigslist, et cetera. And third, enlist influencers. The next archetype is if you are a marketplace or platform, for example, DoorDash, Cameo, Substack. There, there's 3 proven strategies for this archetype. First, reach out to targeted strangers, uh, for example, DM to celebs or email owners. Second, get physical placement, for example, stickers and flyers. And third, enable your supply to drive your demand. And the third archetype is if you have a remarkable story to tell, for example, Airbnb, Spotify, or Superhuman, the email app. The first proven strategy is getting press, and then the second is trying to create viral content. Let's now dive into each strategy. Strategy 1, reach out to friends and colleagues. The easiest and fastest way to find your early users, and a large driver of early growth for about 20% of startups, is to reach out to your friends and former colleagues. Here's a tweet from Paul Graham that Lenny includes in the essay. When you first start a startup, you don't need to get the word out. You need to get the word in. You do not, in the very beginning, need the whole world to know about it. What you need is to find the initial group of early adopters, which you can probably find among your peers. And then Lenny continues, there's little downside to giving this a shot, but just don't get discouraged if it doesn't bear fruit, as your friends may not be anything like your super specific who. And I'll share in a second what Lenny describes the super specific who as. And then basically what he does is he shares 3 things for all these strategies. Who is this strategy ideal for? What is the key for this strategy and what is the takeaway question. So I'm gonna go through these 3 things for each one of the 7 strategies as Lenny lays them out. This strategy is ideal for products that most people will find useful. For example, Reddit, Facebook, or Lyft. The key to this strategy is your friends are close to your super specific who definition. And the super specific who is something you can think of as either your target customer or your ICP, which is your ideal customer profile. And to help you identify your own super specific who for your business, you can start by taking your best guess at the following 5 questions. 1, who are the real people you know who will be exceptionally excited about what you're building? What do they have in common? 2, of your existing users who are happiest and most committed, what do they have in common? 3, who do you know whose life will become instantly better once they've used your product? 4, who do you know whose life will become instantly less painful? And 5, who's asking to pay for this product? And then finally, the takeaway question for this first strategy on reaching out to friends and colleagues is, have you asked your friends to try out your product yet? Now, just like I'm going to do for the remainder of the strategies, and this is how Lenny lays it out in his essay, I'm going to share a few stories of businesses that use this exact strategy in action and what they had to say about the strategy. So the first one is Yelp, and this is by Russell Simmons, one of the co-founders of Yelp. He said, inviting people from our network, mostly former coworkers from PayPal, drove our initial users. We asked all our network to invite their friends, and being startup people who wanted to help us, they obliged. So 2 degrees out, we probably got to to 1,000 or so users. The takeaway is not to underestimate the power of one's personal referral network and to think deeply about the incentive and mechanics. And so one thing I just wanna share here before sharing the next story is that there's 2 things to keep in mind when you're thinking about reaching out to your friends, your network. You really need to understand, are your friends or your network the right fit for who your perfect customer is? If they are, this can be a perfect tactic. If they are not, you probably are gonna wanna think about the other strategies. And the second thing, as Russell Simmons mentioned, is making it as easy and high incentive for your early users to want to share your product, whether it's through giving them money, giving them reputation or social status within your community. It is so important that you basically make it an absolute no-brainer for your early users not just to have a great experience, but to then share that great experience with other people in their network. The second story is from LinkedIn. Uh, Lee Hower, who's on the founding team of LinkedIn, shared this story. And it goes, Reid Hoffman and the rest of the founding team all sent invites to our professional contacts on launch day. We asked all those folks to try the V1 product and invite their professional contacts. In total, that was maybe a couple thousand individuals. During the first 7 days, most of the 12,000-odd people who signed up were either first-degree— example, directly knew someone on the founding team— or second-degree, friend of a friend of someone on the founding team connections. So virtually all of the people who signed up in the first week were part of the startup ecosystem, so they were predisposed to try out new products and had a direct or indirect connection to the LinkedIn team. Next up is strategy 2. Strategy 2 is reaching out to targeted strangers. The second most common way to acquire your first 1,000 users, and it's important for early growth of 30% of consumer startups, is to go recruit them directly, either through email, DMs, phone calls, or door-to-door. Interestingly, this tactic was almost exclusively used by marketplace startups to bootstrap the supply side and rarely used by non-marketplaces. I imagine this is because one unit of supply is worth a lot to a new marketplace. And so the ROI on this manual cold outreach is high enough. One thing I'll just share here is a way that I think about all of these strategies, actually more simply than 7 strategies, is there's 2 ways to get customers for any business, you either have to go one by one or you can leverage what I call the hub and spoke model, meaning you find a hub and that hub can be an influencer. It can be a community in person or online. It can be some sort of social network. Basically, you find something that has access, a vehicle that has access to a ton of individual customers, which gives you leverage. And so what basically this story or what basically this point by Lenny is saying is most non-marketplace businesses will not do outreach to targeted strangers because that requires you to do one-to-one hand-to-hand combat, basically reaching out to every individual customer one by one. And so in general, it only is really worth your time to do that when the value of an individual customer is super high. Otherwise, you want to be trying to think about how can you leverage the hub and spoke model, meaning finding hubs through these various strategies before having to go door to door or one by one. Now, under strategy 2, which is reaching out to targeted strangers, Lenny shares who it's ideal for, the key to making this happen, and the takeaway question. It's ideal for marketplaces and platforms. The key is each new user you recruit is highly valuable. And the takeaway question is, would it be worth having someone on your team ping 100+ people directly? Here are some stories that illustrate this tactic in action. Cameo supply side DMs. The founders hired $10 a month interns to DM talent on Instagram and Twitter. The bet was that they could bring on celebrities and influencers who would message to their audience that they could be booked on Cameo, driving user growth. The interns ended up punching above their weight. And that was from Stefan Henriquez, who was an early employee at Cameo. Again, going back to what Lenny was saying, because celebs are the supply side on Cameo, and they're worth so much money to Cameo because you can't get customers without having the celebs. It was worth interns' time to literally individually DM tons of celebrities on different platforms. The next story is Thumbtack. For those of you that don't know Thumbtack, it's basically the marketplace for booking things like plumbers, handymen, electricians. It's the marketplace for— I think of it as like the Amazon for service professionals. And so Sander Daniels, one of the co-founders, said, we used email marketing to get our first 1,000 users. We found email addresses of local service professionals and messaged them, letting them know we existed. If they registered with Thumbtack, we would start sending them job leads. The number one thing any local service professional wants is new customers. We found new customers for them, notified them via email, and they signed up. And then one more story under strategy 2. Nextdoor, and Nextdoor is a social network for local neighborhoods. Their strategy was door-to-door and phone. The co-founder of Nextdoor, Sarah Leary, said, back then, the founding team knew that it would only work if they could find a neighborhood to embrace the idea of a social network for neighborhoods, as well as test it along the way. Choosing the right neighborhood was essential. That neighborhood is known as Lorelei, nestled close to the bay on streets shaded by trees. The neighborhood was close-knit and small yet vibrant, with the longest-standing homeowners association in The state of California. The community already had some ways to communicate with each other, which was a promising sign. We reached out to board members of the homeowners association, and they were more than willing to hear us out. After an initial conversation, they invited us to present the concept to more residents at their next board meeting. I just want to point out here before we go to strategy 3, that when, when I spoke a minute ago about the hub and spoke model, the homeowners association of Lorelai was 100% a hub that had many spokes, the spokes being the residents of this neighborhood. Strategy 3: Go where your target audience hangs out, online or offline. The single most popular, over 50% effective, and highest ROI strategy for finding your first 1,000 users is to find an existing gathering spot for your super specific who. This is why it's important to be very clear and focused about who these people are and get in front of them there to pitch them. This can include niche online forums, events, transit hubs, Hacker News, Product Hunt, college campuses, malls, or even an REI. Just one note here. Again, I feel like I'm going to just belabor this point, but everything that Lenny just mentioned is a different version of a hub in the hub and spoke model. And by accessing these hubs, you get a leveraged way to get in front of tons of users at once. Lenny then goes on to say this strategy is ideal for most products if a community or meeting point exists. The key for this strategy is to provide real value to people versus just spamming your pitch. And the takeaway question is, what are 1 to 2 places where your super specific who as in your ICP, already gathers. So now let's share a few stories of this tactic in action. With Netflix, they use this strategy through online DVD forums. Marc Randolph, one of the co-founders, says, We realized early on the only way to find DVD owners was in the fringe communities of the internet— user groups, bulletin boards, web forums, and all of the other digital watering holes where enthusiasts met up. Posing as a home theater enthusiast or cinephile, Corey Bridges would join the conversation in communities geared toward DVD fans. Fanatics and movie buffs, befriend the major players, and slowly over time alert the most respected commenters, moderators, and website owners about this great new site called Netflix. We are months from launch, but he was planting seeds that would pay off big time. One thing I would just want to share here is you can kind of see how actually an amazing way to launch a product is to build a community first, because in this example that Marc Randolph talks about, he talks about how Cory Bridges, who I suppose was an early employee or one of the co-founders of Netflix, basically had to insert himself into an existing community of DVD owners, whether it was through web forums or bulletin boards. But imagine if you actually created the community, whether it was a subreddit that you started or even better, a Slack community or Discord community that you owned. All of a sudden you have ownership over this perfect audience that you can then build products around. And that's why, you know, someone who's great to follow if you are interested in leveraging community to launch businesses is Greg Eisenberg, because this is his entire model. The next story is from Etsy, who used craft fairs, which were obviously offline gathering places. The founder of Etsy, Danielle Maviel, said, we did something that works and is often overlooked. We got off the internet and there was a team out there across the US and Canada attending art and craft shows nearly every weekend supporting potential sellers. We would buy them lunch, drop off craft show kits, pass out handmade promos. These were artists and crafters that were influential in the handmade world. We knew if they set up shop on Etsy and were successful, others would follow. The community team went to a different show every single weekend all across the US and Canada. Most sellers I knew did not have any other kind of online presence or activity on other sites. Now I wanna just share one more story, and this is Morning Brew's experience of leveraging strategy 3, which is going where your target audience hangs out online or offline. So when I think about how we got our first 10, 100,000, even 10,000 subscribers for Morning Brew, it was leveraging, as I've said now 5 times, the hub and spoke model. And really it comes down to we had an acute awareness of who our subscriber was. Our perfect subscriber was the college business student who wanted to level up, increase the odds of having a successful career in finance or business after college, and didn't want to be caught off guard In having a conversation with a boss, a coworker, etc. And so then we asked ourselves, what are the congregating places for college business students? And the answer was very clear to us. It was business classes, ideally lectures that had 500 plus students in them, or business clubs, things like the Investment Club, the Consulting Club. You know, there were probably 30 or 40 of these in the business school at Michigan. And so then what my co-founder and I did is we literally went to every single teacher who taught a business class or an economics class, we asked them if as students who are launching this new business media startup that was completely free, if we could pitch our business in their class. I would go to the front of the class, I'd pitch Morning Brew for about a minute. I'd tell people that, you know, there's no downside if they sign up and they hate it, they can always unsubscribe. But in the off chance they really like it, this can be transformational for their careers. Austin would then pass around a sheet of paper. We would have people write down their email addresses. We would then after the class literally run to a table in the Winter Garden, which was the main area of the business school at Michigan. We'd type in all of those handwritten email addresses and we did that over and over and over until we got to a few thousand subscribers. And then basically we launched an ambassador program to get people who were like Austin and myself at other schools to do the exact same process. So that was our version of strategy 3. Next, strategy 4, enlist influencers paid or organically. A powerful yet underutilized way to get your early users is to enlist influencers to talk about your product, either by paying them or just by getting them excited about it. Influencers, if you think about it, are people who influence others. Duh. So your job is to figure out who your super specific who are influenced by and enlist them in your growth plan. This could be bloggers, newsletter writers, tweeters, Instagrammers, or actual celebs. And then again, as with the other strategies, Lenny goes into the 3 things. This strategy, strategy 4, is ideal for founders who know influencers. The key is getting the influencer genuinely excited about what you're building And the takeaway question is, what is at the center of the Venn diagram of one, who you're super specific who is influenced by, and 2, which of them you can get excited about what you're building? So here are some examples of strategy 4, which is enlisting influencers in action from Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram. I think the biggest thing overall was that as we were prototyping and testing Instagram, we gave it to a few folks who had a very large Twitter following, not necessarily a large following overall, but a very large following within a specific community. Specifically, the designer community, the online web design community. We felt that photography and the visual element of what we were doing really resonated with those people, and we gave it to those specific people who had a large following. The second example is Cameo, and this is from Devin Townsend, one of the co-founders. Ronnie Radke was a particular inflection point. The team went on famousbirthdays.com, and CEO Stephen Galanis looked up the most famous person on his birthday. It was Ronnie Radke. Stephen got Ronnie Radke to respond and buy in. Ronnie said, "I'm going." We're going to break Cameo. This is something they would hear a lot, but Radke actually did it. He came on Cameo for $25 and started getting booked like crazy. It was so fast that after a couple of hours, he was booked a couple hundred of times. The team realized that at that rate he was going, he was going to get booked 2,000 times, and there was no way a human can fulfill all of those Cameos. We thought the startup would fail if we disappoint all these fans with unfilled Cameos. At what point does Cameo break? Ronnie ended up getting booked 500 times. 3 days went by, and he hadn't fulfilled any Cameos. Finally, at 7 PM, they're watching the feed, a Telegram bot of fulfilled orders. A Cameo video gets fulfilled by Ronnie. It's the worst Cameo ever. It's 7 seconds, bad lighting, and he mispronounces the customer's name. And then he keeps doing it, with new videos coming in every 30 seconds. The team still thinks the fans are all going to be really upset. The reviews start coming in an hour or 2 later, and they are...

Positive.

They say things like, "Oh my God! I've been a fan of you my whole life. This is amazing." They realize the magic of Cameo is about the relationship between the fan and the talent, and how special it is to hear your name. And Cameo kept on going. Next is strategy five: get press. A surprising number of startups saw their initial growth come from press. Though often advised against, getting press right out of the gate is a very legitimate early growth strategy, responsible for the early growth of over 20% of the most successful consumer startups. It is ideal for products or founders with a great story and a drumbeat of news. For example, multiple city launches. The key is having the skill and connections to get a reporter interested. And the takeaway question is, to a regular person who doesn't care about your company, what's the most interesting or surprising thing about your company? Here are some examples of startups using press to get their early users. Max Mullen, who is the co-founder of Instacart, said, anytime we'd launch a feature or add a new retailer to our marketplace, we'd make a big announcement. And we got a lot of coverage just for doing that. PR is an untapped growth channel for early-stage consumer startups. Founders underestimate the novelty their products and companies represent to the average consumer, and in turn, they don't leverage earned media enough. This is Alex now, and I just want to share a few thoughts on this. One is I think we live in a world in which actually founders and companies can be their own PR. So I'm not totally discrediting PR as in like the PR company. But I think because we all can build audience on the internet now, I've seen such good examples of founders literally doing their own feature launches and making their own news. And one example that I think is an amazing way in which B2B companies are doing PR in a really smart way is my friend Tyler Denk, who started Beehive, which is the email platform Tyler was an early employee at Morning Brew. And what I love about how he does it is he basically has a roadmap for the quarter of every product feature that they are going to ship for Beehive. And every time they ship a new feature, which let's say it's on a weekly or biweekly basis, they effectively have a PR blitz package that they do every time. Tyler tweets something out, his entire organization tweets something out. They make a short animated video that someone in-house does. So basically it's like you take Supreme or any of these luxury clothing brands that do like scarce drops. If you apply that like drop-style marketing to a software company, that is what I think Beehive does. And I think a lot of companies are going to start doing that. And to me, that is the modern version of PR. Next, let's go to strategy 6. Strategy 6 is creating viral content, though rarely effective. Only about 10% of startups— a potentially very high ROI early growth strategy is to create content that goes viral. Only 5 of the more than 100 companies I looked at initially grew this way. But when it works, it's game-changing. It is ideal for founders with an existing audience. The key is being able to write, film, or build something remarkable. And the takeaway question is, what story would get thousands of people to share your content? Some stories of viral content in action. The first is Superhuman, and this is what Rahul Vora, who's the co-founder, says. I like to write high-quality, long-form pieces that will stand the test of time. For example, will be relevant 5+ years from now. These pieces help help drive much of our early growth. And then he shares the 3 pieces that drove a ton of their early growth at Superhuman. The first is RIP Mailbox or Founders: How to Stop Worrying and Love Being Acquired. The second is How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product-Market Fit. And that is literally an article that I have broken down on this very podcast. And the third is Game Design, Not Gamification for Great Products. The second example I wanna share is from one of the early employees at Calm, Which is, you know, the Headspace competitor, the meditation app. And it goes, Alex Too created a website that was basically just some waves lapping on the beach, and it was called doenothinfortwominutes.com. And you literally had to just stare at these waves for 2 minutes and not move your mouse or tap on the keyboard. And not many people could do it. It was surprisingly challenging. But if you got to the end of it, it would ask for your email address. And we collected about 100,000 email addresses. It went super viral. People started sharing it and writing about it. So it was 100,000 email addresses in 2 weeks. Wow. Before moving on to the 7th strategy, I just want to say that I think one of the best companies at viral content and viral marketing is Mischief, M-S-C-H-F. They do these pretty much like they, they've basically just bottled up virality where every time they do one of their product drops, which I feel like is on a monthly basis, it's almost guaranteed to go viral. So check out Mischief if you're into the idea of effectively viral content or viral guerrilla marketing, because Mischief is, I think, the best example of that, and you can try to reverse engineer how do they manufacture virality. And then finally, strategy number 7, get physical placement. A strategy used primarily by food delivery and dating startups, and only about 10% of the startups I looked at, is putting flyers, stickers, and signs where your super specific who spends time, essentially getting in front of your super specific who's eyes as they go about their day. It is ideal for products that require customers to be local The key is hustle. And the takeaway question is, if you could put flyers, stickers, or signs somewhere, where would you? And the takeaway question is, if you could put flyers, stickers, or signs somewhere, where would you? Some stories of this tactic in action. So with DoorDash, Tony Hsu, the co-founder, said, what we learned about our customers is that they didn't care about DoorDash. They cared about the restaurant. So what we did was print out tens of thousands of flyers that said, Dubar delivers, get hummus delivered. We stuffed them in our delivery bags. The bill of the flyers exceeded our cash balance. Later, we printed a bunch of flyers charging $6 for delivery and put them all over Stanford University. And the second story is from Grubhub. Casey Winters, who was an early growth lead there, said, we did in-store signage, but we copied it from Yelp, which was the first with their People Love Us on Yelp stickers. We did open and close signs, sandwich boards, printed menus, business cards with promos on it, delivery bags. You name it, we tried it. And so to summarize, these are the 7 most common early growth strategies. 1, reach out to friends and colleagues. 2, reach out to targeted strangers. 3, go where your target audience hangs out online or offline. 4, enlist influencers paid or organically. 5, get press. 6, create viral content. And 7, get physical placement, i.e., flyers, stickers, and signs. Before we move on, one interesting way to think about this list of strategies is as a series of concentric circles with the founder at the center. The further out from the center, founder gets, the harder and less likely to succeed these strategies generally are. So in your decision of where to start, start with the easy stuff and migrate outward if nothing is working. Just before we go into the last part of this essay, I just want to share that I totally agree with Lenny. And the way I think about it is how do you go from your warmest possible leads to your coldest possible leads, right? So friends and colleagues are always going to be way warmer than creating viral content. And so you should probably start with friends and colleagues until you've proven to yourself that that will not be a viable channel. So always go from closest to the founder or warmest lead to coldest lead as you test out your different organic marketing channels to ultimately triangulate on the one or two that you're going to put all of your resource into. And now here's the final section of the essay. Bonus: Off-menu early growth strategies. Although the 7 options above are by far the most common, common, there are other tactics I've come across that have helped startups kickstart growth, though they are rarely used or only useful in very specific instances. I want to make this post as complete as possible. Below, I've outlined 4, and I'll add any new strategies and stories as I learn of them. Here's the list so far. First, build an audience first. Second, enable your supply to drive your demand. Third, be first to figure out an emerging platform. And fourth, host a launch party. So let's go through each of these quickly. First, build an audience first. So let me read you an example by Product Hunt. Product Hunt, a daily leaderboard of new products, began as an email list using LinkyDink, a tool for creating collaborative daily email digests. Over Thanksgiving break, we designed and built Product Hunt. Meanwhile, we reached out to contributors in the MVP and other respected product people, sharing early mocks and gathering feedback. We weren't just doing customer development, we were getting them excited and making them feel like part of the product, and they were helping guide our design decisions. 5 days later, we had a very minimal but fully functional product. We emailed our supporters a link to Product Hunt, informing them not to share it publicly. The supporters were thrilled to join and play with a working version of something that they had thought about and indirectly helped build. That day, we acquired our first 30 users. By the end of the week, we had 100 users and felt ready to share Product Hunt with the world. Strategy 2, or I should say bonus strategy 2: enable your supply to drive your demand. Many platforms and marketplaces, including DoorDash, Etsy, Cameo, Behance, Product Hunt, and Substack, are examples of this. So let me share one from DoorDash. Micah Moreau, who's an early growth leader from DoorDash, said restaurants did a lot of the marketing for us. They would actually print placards and stickers and put them up in the restaurant without our help and often without us knowing. Stickers on the windows worked extremely well. Restaurant owners are enterprising entrepreneurs and are super creative at driving demand. The third bonus strategy is being first to figure out an emerging platform. Three examples of that include Noom, TikTok, and WhatsApp. And I'm going to share an example from Noom specifically by Nikhil, who is one of their early growth leaders. He said Noom's first product way before my time was the fourth app in the Android store when it launched, and as a result got a lot of organic downloads. Artem had a connection at Google at the time, which helped getting placed. The broader lesson is getting into a new channel early to get your first users. And the 4th bonus strategy is hosting a launch party, a.k.a.

Hinge.

And this is from Justin McLeod, the co-founder of Hinge, the dating app. He said, we took our last $25,000 and we threw a 2,500-person launch party in D.C. We set the date and we just worked backwards from that. We were just like, we've got to get everyone on at once. No one's going to stick around if there's not a lot of people on this thing. We're just going to like get 2,500 people in here. They're going to be like the coolest, trendiest people in D.C., and they're all going to see each other downloading the app. And so they're going to think it's cool and they're going to keep using it. We had an open bar. Tito's Vodka just like shipped us a bunch of alcohol for free. We had a DJ, we had an art exhibition, we had photo booths and a dance party, and everyone had to download the app to get in the door. That is it for today's Founders Journal.

As always, thank you so much for listening to the pod and I will catch you next episode. And if you have any questions, you want to say what's up, or you want to recommend a future episode or topic I should talk about, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. That is alex@storyarb.com.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next time.