Ideas

Matter, the read-it-later app, found their first users by partnering with communities. These include The Interintellect (run by Anna Gat). Progress Studies (run by Jason Crawford) & The Long Now…

Udemy's first course was in partnership with Startup Digest, a newsletter that had over 50,000 subscribers.

Speeddate got most of their first 2,000 using the live chat app Meebo and embedded their app on the service. Alcove got most of their first early listings from owners…

Kismet and Twitter got their big breaks by at SXSW (South By South West).

Trello got their first customers by presenting (revealing) the product at Techcrunch Disrupt. They got over 130,000 website visitors over the following 48 hours.

At 7 am every morning, Bloomberg visited the Merril Lynch office and offered coffee (or tea) to people reading the newspaper. Merrill Lynch became his first enterprise client.

Etsy and Nike got their start at Trade shows. Etsy visited one or two trade shows every weekend to recruit sellers. At the same time, Nike relied on the biggest…

DigitalOcean got its first 50 customers by demoing in front of a New York tech meetup. Similarly, Github got its first users from demoing the product at Ruby on Rails…

Linkedin is one of the few social media platforms where you can still get a sizeable organic reach. Wonsulting founders build the company on top of actively posting on Linkedin.

“In one month, we launched the website and went to other gaming Discord groups to tell them about this new site we built. We got a ton of traffic just…