5 ms·

Those were not their first 10,000 users.

• tux1968 8y ago
  If I remember correctly it was at least their first 100,000 users. Every person who signed up got $20 and $20 more for each referral; that's paying to acquire your first users directly. Was eventually trimmed down to $10, then $5 before being dropped altogether around 1,000,000 users or so I think. And advertising mostly took care of itself via word of mouth. Of course, that's ridiculously out of reach for a lot of startups, but it is definitely paying to acquire your first users.
  • aey 8y ago
    If you can get 10k grassroots users, you can make the argument for raising capital to scale the company through marketing. If you can't get any grassroots users by giving away the product for free and you need to pay to acquire them it might not be a great idea to raise capital.