How did Dropbox · Airbnb · reddit · Tinder etc. earn the initial user?

BySlimmer_jimmer

A lot of startups are born in Silicon Valley, many of them will disappear without looking at the eyes, but hopefully there will be people who do not know now will be like Dropbox and Airbnb which grew into such a big company I can. Indeed, reddit has summarized the strategies of each time, how each success was successful in successfully acquiring the first user in the startup.

How startups such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Groupon and others removed their first users.: Entrepreneur
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2clqa3/how_startups_such_as_dropbox_airbnb_groupon_and/

◆ Dropbox which won over 70,000 users overnight
"Dropbox" which started service development in 2008 was struggling to acquire new users. Even if you deployed an advertising campaign, it seems that it was a state of bicycle operation where only $ 99 product is sold every $ 300. Dropbox's Drew Houston CEO and colleagues thought that a different approach was needed and created a video about 4 minutes to show how Dropbox can actually be used.

ByLaughterwym

Mr. Houston was a user of the social bookmarking site · Digg, but the movie was juggled with jokes that the viewers could see, such as "TPS Report" or "Tom Cruise" that seems to be uk with Digg. Successfully, the video succeeded in getting the top class vote at Digg. Dropbox has acquired over 70,000 new users by the next day. In addition, the campaign "If you share on Facebook and Twitter, you get a free 128 MB additional capacity" campaign has become a hot topic, and 2.80 million invitations were generated in 30 days from the start of the campaign.

DropBox Demo - YouTube


◆ reddit & quora where self-made performances performed successfully
The social bookmarking site "reddit" and the Q & A site "Quora" have a negative spiral of "contents are scarce because users are not gathering" and "content is scarce because users are not gathering" Make it "approach was solved.

Quora increased "Q & A" by the management team creating accounts, answering questions from other users on their profile, or asking backwards. Likewise, reddit also created accounts and created threads, but reddit's management team also created a fake account and as many users share the links released by the management team He said that he pretended. In other words, although it was doing "self-made performances", according to Steve Huffman co-founder of reddit, it reveals that it took several months before it became unnecessary to issue "self-made home thread" on the front page.

Also, at that time reddit had no "subreddits" pointing to communities that gathered specific genres, posts of all genres were posted at the same place, and Quora concentrates on increasing Q & A focusing on technology genres was doing. It seems that the increase in the number of users also caused users to concentrate in one place, so that the users felt that the community seems to be crowded without becoming disagreeable for each genre.

ByScott Beale

◆ Tinder overturning the concept of dating apps
The dating application "Tinder" now used around the world has succeeded in flipping the notion of the "online dating service" that was exhausted at that time. How to use Tinder is simple, just look at the photo of the person's face displayed in the application, if you do not like it, just swipe to the right if you like it. If they are "swiping right" (mutually), they can only match and exchange messages. There was also a service that provided a similar mechanism on PC, but it seems that Tinder was the first time this mechanism appeared on mobile.


With the existing online dating service, there was a lot of messages flooded with messages that were not readable to attractive female accounts, and there were many problems that no response was coming to anyone who was not motivated. Tinder's double opt-in method succeeded in solving the problem of the existing online dating service because it can not exchange messages only with the other persons who are interested in each other.

In addition, Tinder believes that "more than 5,000 users from all over the world, one 50 users" is more important, holding a student-only party at the University of Southern California. Party participants were on the spot on condition that they installed Tinder's app on the smartphone, so it goes without saying that the "Party you can meet right away" became a rumor in the review.

◆ Airbnb who pulled the user from Craigslist
An empty room rental site "Airbnb" tried to make a self-made performance to make a fake offer as well as reddit etc, but it seems that it did not go well. So, Airbnb changed its approach and looked at the regional information exchange site "Craigslist". At that time Craigslist was already one of the popular sites, there were several posts that would like to rent out vacant apartments and villas. Airbnb sent an invitation email to the Craigslist user who was doing such posts and succeeded being a host of Airbnb.

In addition, Airbnb helped photography of the user who became the initial host, and it seems that it assisted the host 's service continuation by allowing the borrower to attach the house which was previously lent out at 200 dollars per week for even 400 dollars a week.