Yes, and that's exactly how Heroku started too. You bait as many people as possible as early as possible, often by giving subsidies, free stuff and extreme price cuts that make you stand out. Don't forget to give away silly swag and free stickers at random "cloud conventions". None of that is sustainable in the long run (because you're bleeding cash), but your goal is to grow a large user base and get the word-of-mouth out there quickly. Once you have amassed a large population of users you start tightening the lock-in across the entire platform, and slowly raising prices across the board. Or, you keep raising money from VCs to cover up the losses with the promise of being profitable one day. Rinse and repeat.
This is the story of pretty much every cloud provider out there. The cloud is just someone else's computer.