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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

What about the PayPal way? They took a certain amount of VC money and used it to buy and sell on EBay and demand to pay/sell using only PayPal. It basically acted as a parasite on EBay until they reached critical mass. I call it "gamification of established platform". Diabolical but effective. PayPal's company mascot should be the Sea Lamprey.

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I believe the primary way they succeeded was giving away money. When you signed up they'd give you $10. Later it was reduced to $5. You could also get that amount by signing up friends

This is the same way Square's cash app has grown very fast to 50 million users, buy giving away $5 to each new user referred.

would uber count? They subsidize the cost of rides to get users.

Heh, this is the first time I've heard this. Before I was only familiar with the up-from-bootstraps "we just became so popular through a pay button everyone loved" success story.

But some many online payment companies had already tried and failed at "traditional" growth. PayPal crossed the chasm by essentially bad faith gamesmanship. Nothing illegal, mind you; but I would consider it highly unethical. Not to mention difficult to stop if you're EBay.

Why would it have been difficult to stop for eBay, couldn't they have simply removed the PayPal button from their site if they didn't like it?

as I read the above PayPal wasnt a button on eBay yet. Just based on the above comments it sounds like initially PayPal staff were doing a bunch of buying and selling on eBay and insisting they they be paid via this thing called 'PayPal'.