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Tinder: pitched the idea to sororities and fraternities around USC campus DoorDash: printed menus and fliers and put them all over Stanford Lyft: asked people in the team for contacts at other startups and arranged a drop-off to give out ice cream and Lyft credits, sent personal invites to friends Uber: went to places like Caltrain station to hand out referral codes Snapchat: went to shopping malls to hand out flyers Etsy: went to all craft fairs across US and recruited sellers Pinterest: started as an invite-only community, went to Apple stores and changed all the computers to say Pinterest, emailed the founder’s connections Dropbox: created a demo and published it on Hacker News TikTok: put a really long application name on App Store so the search engine gave it more weight Loom: launched on Product Hunt, talked to organizations, introduced a referral system Netflix: joined online communities about DVD and movies, befriend my major players and moderators, and slowly, over time, tell them about Netflix Buffer: acquired 100k users solely through guest blogging (150 posts) Yelp: invited friends, mostly coworkers from PayPal and asked them to invite their friends Facebook: invited friends, put on mailing list Quora: had D’Angelo’s and Cheever’s college and high school’s friends, let users invite people LinkedIn: had Reid’s successful friends and connections Slack: asked friends at other companies to try out and give feedbacks Clubhouse: did a private Testflight, kept high quality, made it exclusive, had high-quality referrals from seed users Instagram: gave it to a few people who had large Twitter following within a specific community, contacted press directly Robinhood: put up a landing page with a waitlist that showed how many people were ahead of you or behind you Spotify: new users must be invited by existing users Twitter: leveraged influencer’s posts Product Hunt: started as an email list, sent personal emails to influencers and invited them to contribute to press Airbnb: took an advantage of a political event, made custom cereal boxes with messages to well-known tech bloggers StackOverflow: both founders already had a large followers on their blogs so they invited them to a private beta Asana, Intercom, Okta, Coda: asked friends and former colleagues Carta: asked the angle investors and sister portfolio founders Gusto: first 10 customers came from friends founders knew, YC batch, non-tech small businesses Stripe: setup Stripe on the spot for people who wanted to try, looked for personal connections Amplitude: first customers came from YC network Shopify, New Relic: showed the Ruby On Rails developer community Plaid: grew through word of mouth in the developer and product manager community via forums, IRC, meetups, startup accelerators Figma: cold emailed designers on Twitter Square: met and spoke with actual merchants in person Atlassian: targeted open-source communities, mailing lists, IRC Segment: launched as an open-source library on Hacker News Airtable: invited friends and family then published to Hacker News Twilio: launched on Tech Crunch in private beta References:...

What is network effect? Network effect describes what happens when products get more valuable as more people use them. If your friends, family, coworkers, celebrities you follow aren’t using the same apps you’re using, you will leave. The network is pretty much useless. Network effects are embedded into many of the successful products around us in different variations. eBay, Uber, Airbnb are networks of buyers and sellers. Dropbox, Slack, Google Suite are networks of your teammates and coworkers....

Viral Marketing Viral marketing is the process of getting your existing users to refer others to your product. It can come from different forms: Pure word of mouth: people naturally tell people about your product. Inherent virality: people can only get value by inviting others (chat app, social media app). Collaboration: the product becomes more valuable when used collaboratively (Google Docs). Embedded communication from the product (Apple’s “Sent from my iPhone”)....