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Err the Blog had about 10,000 readers when GitHub launched and Chris and PJ already had a ton of users of their popular Rails plugins.

This was a huge audience to launch to. What advice would you give to people who want to dive in to their own company without trying to build up such a huge following before hand?

Is it madness to try to bootstrap without establishing an audience beforehand?

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I started Gravatar when I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It grew quite rapidly. The single most important lesson you can learn from GitHub and Gravatar is that virality and community can help turn any good idea into a huge success. Make something that people can use to show others how great they are. Kathy Sierra talks a lot about this concept. People love interacting with other people. Figure out how to make that work for your idea.

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