How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1k users

Yup, they got sued for it too: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/linkedin-class-action-email...

I will never ever create a LinkedIn account, the hard sell techniques, spam to my inbox and aggressiveness is so off-putting that I would rather eat my own barf. This whole company and its power users reeks to me from outside like a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross: a bunch of hustlers trying to fake-it-till-they-make-it, appear super-important and trump up their bogus businessperson profiles and pretend connections.

Many people buy Reddit Premium to get rid of ads. Each month also grants you 700 coins, which is enough to award a gold and two silvers. Receiving a gold gives you enough coins to give a silver (I think, I don't remember the exact ratio). That is where a ton of awards come from.

Employees do get free gold to hand out, but the ratio isn't as high as you'd think.

I’ve been a soundsystem mc and organizing parties since 97. I have noticed similar behavior on the patrons attending. People either need to get tipsy enough or someone else has to have the courage and be the first one dancing. Now, even if it’s not my show, I tend to be early on dancing and that usually opens up “queue”.. ratio of lurkers is ofcourse high but the genre is more geared towards people coming to actually dance.

Not just that, there was one dating site that I joined after a friend of mine recommended it to me, and I soon realized that said site was “recycling” direct messages. What I mean is, they took real messages that their users had sent to other people on the site and they sent these messages to new users. In this way they roped people into paying for premium so that you can respond to messages. And canceling the membership was really difficult too. And when I went to their terms and conditions I saw that they had sneakily put in the ToC, that no one reads, that the site was “for entertainment” and some additional wording, in order to be able to defend what they were doing. At the end of the day it’s basically fraud IMO, and super scummy behavior even if they are able to get away with it legally.

When Reddit replaced Digg, it was because Reddit was trailing Digg closely in the shadows. Specifically, Reddit was already successfully grown, well featured, reasonably scalable, merely ranked #2 in public perception and numbers. Digg made multiple critical mistakes, and Reddit was ready to accept the thrown.

Reddit has made some critical mistakes, also has had a small number of long outages, but there is no powerful force lurking in the shadows.

The forces in the shadow of Reddit today usually have several terminal weaknesses. They won't be able to handle a 100x traffic surprise, both culturally and their servers, when a true exodus will probably be at least 1000x. They often exist for a single topic, which is frequently bigotry.

Best of luck to anyone trying.

I remember the good days when Uber paid £20 per sign up here in the UK.

I was on early and would just round people up at the end of a house party by shouting “who wants a free taxi home?!”.

I had free service for about a year.

You start by pretending you're 10 users to create social proof, then a massive spamming campaign should get you to 100 users, and then you fudge the books and say you have 1k to anyone who asks.

That's generally what the companies listed in the article did too.

> There was a secret in the app store. You could make the application name really really long. And the search engine on the App Store gives more weight to the application name rather than the keybookwords defined. So we put a really long application name, "make awesome music videos with all kinds of effects for Instagram, Facebook, Messenger”. And then traffic came from the search engine. That's how we initially got started.

Longer app length = more random/other stuff matches = more views

It’s in the article.

If we had 1,000,000 apps using the same tactics but in the end only 10 get successful would think the tactics had anything to do with the success of the 10? You have to look at the losers too.

Same, it's the reason why I will have to partner with someone with that set of skills for my next SaaS or app.

This is correct IIRC.

I got in early when it was 1GB!

As you say, at the time over free email was only in the single or 10s of MBs.

Or you had your work email!

OMG to think I used to use Work email for personal emailing!

GMAIL also came out with a different and fresh approach to sorting and filing! No more folders, it was tagging and filtering! Which felt very cool and modern at the time!

I do not recall it being FOMO. It was 2GB of free email when Yahoo and Hotmail were offering what, 20MB or 200MB?

I also recall Google offering some combination of IMAP/POP/email forwarding/"send mail as" features whereas Yahoo/Hotmail did not, but I do not recall the exact features that Google offered that the others did not.

It was a superior email service, from a company that was growing by leaps and bounds and was obviously going to be huge, so you also wanted to grab an email address without too many numbers.

I would have thought Google requiring invites was simply so that they did not get overwhelmed by demand all at once that they could not handle.