How Successful Startups Got Their First 1000 Customers (Uber, Product Hunt & More) (#362)

TL;DR

Successful startups got their first thousand customers by manually doing unscalable things: Ryan Hoover personally emailed and tweeted at people to post on Product Hunt daily from a coffee shop; a band called Carolanka used an Instagram ad funnel leading to a custom song and ticket push; Uber’s early code was written by a Mexican agency with Spanish comments and the founders didn’t work on it full

Key insights

• Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt by acting as the human invite, notification, and retention system — sending hundreds of personalized emails and tweets per day from Phil’s coffee shop, using a third-par
• The band Carolanka ran an Instagram ad that opened a Facebook Messenger thread, used the user’s name automatically, sent a personalized audio note and a custom song on SoundCloud, then pushed tickets
• Airbnb’s early “unscalable” tactic of going to hosts’ houses to take professional photos eventually became a scalable fleet of photographers.