4 ms·

I've been following these techniques for decades: 1) PG and Viaweb had no traction until they hired a PR firm. Back in the day, those were $5k to $15k/month.

I've been following these techniques for decades: 1) PG and Viaweb had no traction until they hired a PR firm. Back in the day, those were $5k to $15k/month. "It took a painfully long time for word of mouth to get going, and we did not start to get a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm (admittedly the best in the business) for $16,000 per month." https://www.you-books.com/book/P-Graham/Essays https://www.you-books.com/book/P-Graham/Essays YC now has "BookFace", so I suppose you could just promote to other YC'ers if you have an account. 2) Hotmail used a footer on every email for viral mindshare. 3) At Yahoo, new properties were announced on internal employee lists and it was requested that say 500 employees would seed the new service so it didn't look like a ghost town. 4) Most of the social networks spammed your contact list to go viral. Or just changed preferences underneath what you set, like Linkedin and Facebook. 5) Most of the dating sites early on send emails from women, even when you don't have an account on those sites!

bemmu 6y ago
As for 4), it looks like it was indeed very important for Facebook. Here's a quote from Steven Levy's book "Facebook": For months, the two companies had been feuding over the way Facebook was scraping data from Hotmail and MSN Messenger products. Facebook had its own complaint—as retaliation, Hotmail had begun labeling invitations to join Facebook as spam. According to The Facebook Effect, Moskovitz said that this caused a 70 percent drop in new users. Later on when Microsoft buys a stake in Facebook, they stop classifying the invites as spam.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I hadn't read that spam pass statistic before. IIRC, FB also got MS Messenger chat access for FB messenger for a period of time after MS' investment, then that abruptly ended (likely the day the initial agreement expired.)

bemmu 6y ago

As for 4), it looks like it was indeed very important for Facebook. Here's a quote from Steven Levy's book "Facebook": For months, the two companies had been feuding over the way Facebook was scraping data from Hotmail and MSN Messenger products. Facebook had its own complaint—as retaliation, Hotmail had begun labeling invitations to join Facebook as spam. According to The Facebook Effect, Moskovitz said that this caused a 70 percent drop in new users. Later on when Microsoft buys a stake in Facebook, they stop classifying the invites as spam.

redis_mlc 6y ago
I hadn't read that spam pass statistic before. IIRC, FB also got MS Messenger chat access for FB messenger for a period of time after MS' investment, then that abruptly ended (likely the day the initial agreement expired.)