Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users

We started working on it January 2015, and within, I'd say two months, some of our friends were very excited about it, but we didn't really have any users. But it was pretty clear they wanted to use it. It just like, wasn't exactly correct. So we, we, like, we re. We like, rebuilt the Voice chat engine three times, you know, for example, but I'd say within three or four months, we had like 20 DAU that weren't us. You know, when we got to this place where we had 20 DAU, we actually were having a hard time figuring out how to get more people to use the product. We were like, how do we get the word out? Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, this is the dumbest idea ever. Like, no one's going to use this. And even people who played games, many of them thought, like, why would I want this? I already have whatever app I'm using. And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it. But we ended up figuring out a way to get the word out that people responded to positively that caused them to start trying it. And then it started to grow on its own. But there was like a period of three or four weeks where I remember we were sitting around thinking, like, well, we like this, but maybe no one else does. Like, we had built the product and we just hadn't figured out how to get the word out. What was the unlock? The unlock for us was, was inviting people to give feedback on the app as opposed to saying, like, try this thing out, like, we're selling it to you. What we actually did is we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit on Reddit where there was a new expansion coming out for this. And we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit, basically saying, hey, I'm trying out this new VoiceOver IP app. What do y' all think about it? And then they, they, they basically said, I found this thing called Discord. What does anyone think about it? And we went into that. That thread on Reddit and posted a link to a Discord server, which is like the group chat, we call them the servers, where me and my co founder were hanging out and people would like, found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out, and they went back to the subreddit and we're like, hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool. We got 50 users that day from that post, and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day, and it sort of started to snowball. And then we kind of did this playbook a little bit for, like, six months, and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.