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Startup First Users — How billion & million dollar companies got their first users
Many billion and million-dollar companies did not start out with huge budgets, they often bootstrapped to get their first users. This page contains insights on how 30+ well-known companies got their first users.
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Startup First User is an overview of how famous startups got their early adopters through the door and how they went from the startup to scale-up phase. It's filled with (in)famous launching strategies and companies that unlocked new engines of growth. A lot of these are from before there was such a term as 'growth hacking'.
Enjoy and give Frank your thoughts, I know he worked hard on it.
@leonpals Thanks again for sharing - really appreciate it, and glad you liked the contents!
Hey Producthunt!
@leonpals - thank you so much for hunting!
Startup First Users is a collection of stories about billion & million-dollar companies, focused on how they got their very first users from scratch.
Though they may have millions and billions in revenue today, most companies started out with a limited budget.
I've been fascinated about the early stories of successful companies for a long time, reading books and blog, listening to podcasts, and reaching out to companies about how they got their first users.
So, here it is. A collection of 30+ successful companies. I decided to launch this as part of my future free email course on early user growth at https://earlyusergrowth.com, as I believe the obstacles of not being able to find your first users can be fixed by understanding how other companies have done it.
Thanks to everybody who has helped me out so far!
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them down below.
@leonpals @fheijdenrijk We struggled with this early on as a B2B SaaS company, so we launched Paid http://bit.ly/2LmCgDQ. Paid helps SaaS companies get their first 100 paid 💸users and compensates early adopters for their time. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions!
We're working on getting our first users now for our CRO app so this is a great piece of information, thank you!
I love this kind of content, but I wouldn't bother going in and read this. I would, however read it piece by piece if I would get one example per day/week as an email. Any change you could do that? 🙈 🙏
It is unclear whether you get the stories right away on the onboarding email, or if it's after you give your email to start with? Sounds great but as a UX it has a long way to go in communicating exactly what the product is (or will be) and what I as a customer am expected to do
Just noticed that the product itself is not the website itself but a landing page. I'm still kinda confused as to what the company does but at least I can read the mentioned stories =D
I love this. I'm posting this to my private group for our Free PR Bootcamp on earned.co - really cool to see that quite a few used PR to get early traction. Nice work
Great work guys, we at Jumppl have struggled a lot gaining early traction, and it doesn't help thst we are playing in a space with players like Basecamp, Asana, Monday and Slack.
This will really give us more ideas to come up with new tactics.
Thanks!
Nice idea and great resources.
Suggestion: It'd be good to share the Product journey also- from the founder side (If they've written about it).
for eg: Story of Gumroad on medium by the founder,
https://marker.medium.com/reflec...
I've been waiting for a website like this. As an early startup founder I struggle with getting my first users in the door myself. This website definitely helps.
@jorisderuiter Pretty much every company struggles with user growth at the start. It's all about finding different ways to attract customers until you find something that sticks. That's what all these companies have done and it worked well for them.
Jason and Tyler 100mph Podcast - Episode 1