In short: spam (AirBnb), cheat (fake Reddit users), and/or gamify your process to addict your users like a casino would (Foursquare). This is usually seen as unethical, but if you make a lot of money then it's all right in the end.<p>I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with marketing? "
I've always found it amusing how shocked/surprised people are about the Reddit fake users strategy. It's like, the best way you can tell people had no experience with internet forums or community management before the days of social media.<p>What Reddit did here is basically what about 70%* of internet forums did to get their initial users. Made up a bunch of fake user accounts and posted under them for however long it took until actual people started using the site. Heck, some people did this on an almost industrial scale with stuff like Yahoo Answers feeds and what not.<p>That's because people don't use a community that isn't active for much the same reason they don't tend to eat in a restaurant that's deserted; they take the lack of activity as a sign of low quality. So if you want to get a community site active, you'll need to resort to 'questionable' things.<p>* I say this because there are other means of getting forums active, like doing post exchanges with people on admin/forum promotion sites or signing up to services which give you points for posting on other websites in the network and then do likewise for people who use your own site. But to some degree, almost all forums and community sites get big due to 'enticed' users that aren't posting there purely for the love of the topic/community.
One of "How I built this" best episodes, IMO, is about Airbnb.<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/best-of-tech-startups/how-i-built-this-airbnb-joe-gebbia" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/best-of-tech-startups/how-i-built-thi...</a>
I don't know what lines exactly you can draw through all of these. Maybe..., how you get users at first may not be what you will be doing later on.<p>Some of these are treacherous, if you keep in mind that there are various hindsight biases inevitable in a list like this. Forum sockpuppeting is a little dishonest, but it doesn't give me the creeps. On a dating sites it would. More sensitive feelings involved. Acquisition methods can get "addictive" if they are not surpassed by other user acquisition methods, so there's a danger of becoming a spammy, creepy company. This is where hindsight biases probably blind us to all the AirBnBs that got stuck spamming craigslist rather than using it as a stepping stone.<p>The stories I like best here are Tinder, Groupon and the other "start local" strategies. FB did this to an extent too. It's hard to answer the chicken-egg riddle generally, but if we're asking about an individual chicken the answer is obviously "egg."<p>Unscalable local stuff lets startups compete on a seperate playing field because "doesn't scale" often means no one else is doing it. It also lends well to meeting users and starting simple. It also helps for thinking up startup ideas. If the question becomes "<i>how to get 70 people in one area using this thing&</i>" problems become more tractable, and ideas flow better.
And Spotify started with being a torrent client for the employees MP3 library: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-files-new-book-1795109991" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-fi...</a>
About the video making part, can someone provide some resources on making videos (company, websites, software etc)? Looking at kickstarter, I find many of their video share a common "theme". I wonder if there are company/online service that dedicated in making video for kickstart campaigns?
A lot of people here in the comments section are saying that the things these companies did to launch were unethical. I disagree. It just goes to show you the lengths one must go to successfully launch a new product/service out into a vacuum. To create something new and original from nothing, you may have to go to extreme lengths.