How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users – Issue 25
You’ll find first-hand accounts of how essentially every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including lessons from Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Netflix, and many more. Enjoy!
“The very first iteration of DoorDash was a website called paloaltodelivery.com with PDF’d menus of restaurants in Palo Alto. Tony and the team printed a bunch of flyers charging $6 for delivery and put them all over Stanford University. He and the team first wanted to see if there was demand. That was how it all started. A website with PDF menus and flyers.”
Motivation is Overvalued. Environment Often Matters More.
“When agriculture began to spread around the globe, farmers had an easier time expanding along east-west routes than along north-south ones. This is because locations along the same latitude generally share similar climates, amounts of sunlight and rainfall, and changes in season. These factors allowed farmers in Europe and Asia to domesticate a few crops and grow them along the entire stretch of land from France to China.”
“Play the game in an environment that favors you.”
How Uber Grew Quickly
In 2 years, Uber went from being in just a few cities to more than 100.
How did Uber grow so quickly? We recruited hundreds of thousands of drivers.
I get asked a lot about how we did it, so here are some lessons that might be helpful to other startups 👇👇👇
— Scott Gorlick (@sgorlick) August 17, 2020
Bubble Behavior During a Depression
“In her book Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004, Maggie Mahar notes, “In 2002, fully 56 percent of those who owned stocks or stock funds had purchased their first shares sometime after 1990, while 30 percent of all equity investors had gotten their feet wet only after 1995.”
An Unlikely Hero for 1906, 1929…and Today
His story shows that innovation often comes when unlikely people and unusual events collide. Born in 1870, Amadeo Peter Giannini quit school at age 15, becoming a wildly successful fruit-and-vegetable merchant. At the age of 31, three years before he went into banking, he had a net worth of about $300,000 — more than $9 million in today’s money.