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. Some of the

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. 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. 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." 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 "how to get 70 people in one area using this thing&" problems become more tractable, and ideas flow better.