Startup First Users — How billion & million dollar companies got their first users

Great stuff Frank! Have just been reading through and honestly a great resource. People fall into the trap of copying big companies now. But that only makes sense if you also a big company. If you're just starting out you'll learn far more by copying the techniques these companies used to get started in the first place. Something I will keep coming back to for inspiration for sure.

That's the biggest issue we are facing for our new product. Great resource to learn from other companies.

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? 🙈 🙏

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting! Some proofreading is necessary though. For example "Dropbox got the irst 5,000 users"

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

Working in growth marketing is definitely exciting and each company's path is different. It's always reassuring to read these stories. Patience and perseverance can take you a long way. Thanks for putting together this business growth encyclopedia.

This is a great compilation of stories on how to get first users. It's good to see how Paypal, Stripe & Co. started, what they have done and that it's possible. I've been through several startups on the page and it is inspiring, confirming, and makes me smile because of the memories of earlier versions of some services. And the UI is fine. It makes fun to discover new stories just by scrolling down.

I think the main thing that stops many products from gaining momentum is that point exactly – when you already have "something" but need to find your first adopters who will start using that thing. This site aims for this problem, and hits where it hurts, because there's a lot of info on the net about how you can get your first adopters, but it usually doesn't refer to successful cases or doesn't let you compare them to come up with your plan. This product will be huge, I suspect.

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...

@fheijdenrijk, loved the product - Startup First Users, especially stories in quick read format. It is not surprising that most of the tech companies acquired their first users via word-of-mouth, given the quick and trusted feedback that is received from this medium. Curious to understand your take on content packaging products. How do you differentiate your product from other similar products in the market?

This is amazing! I’d also love to see at what point did they start to feel the tipping effect / Product - market fit i.e. was it at first 100, 1000 or 10,000 users?

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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

Great source, would be great to see some algorithmic approach later to recommend users based on their company type and product what could be approach for them that would potentially work! Well done!

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!

We're working on getting our first users now for our CRO app so this is a great piece of information, thank you!

clearly very useful ! we're using some of the tips already for our application to connect people nownow: https://www.producthunt.com/post...