10 examples of big startups manually recruiting their first customers

AmandaRob · 04-27-2023, 04:09 PM

Tinder and Bumble (Whitney Wolfe and Justin Mateen) would pitch their app on campuses and recruit the first users. People were curious to see who else was single on campus which is how it got traction.
Doordash (Tony Xu) made a ghetto landing page (paloaltodelivery.com), got a few customers that way, and then also promoted it on their campus (flyers on Stanford).
The founder of Pinterest (Ben Silbermann) tried everything under the sun to get his first users. He even went into Apple stores and made Pinterest to homepage on all macs. (Eventually the found traction with moms and organized in-person get-togethers.)
Uber founder Travis Kalanich went to Twitter HQ and personally handed out referral codes.
Evan Spiegel of Snapchat would download the app FOR people. He'd go to shopping malls to pitch random people.
Dropbox founder Drew Houston posted a demo video on Hacker News.
Loom posted on Product Hunt which got them their first 3000 users.
Netflix infiltrated the forums where their audience was hanging out: communities of DVD owners who're willing to try out something new. (Netflix started with shipping movies via mail so you didn't have to go to a Blockbusters, return them, deal with late fees, etc.)
Oliver Brocato of Tabs chocolate got his first customers by working with micro influencers. They'd make native content about the brand and get a cut for the sales they were responsible for.