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more & more, i get the sense that a great % of the b2c startups that achieve critical mass do something 'sneaky' along the way to get over that initial hump. i

more & more, i get the sense that a great % of the b2c startups that achieve critical mass do something 'sneaky' along the way to get over that initial hump. in facebook's case, the untold story is they basically blasted the university email databases -- how else could you scale a social network when everyone's attention was already so diverted? (i'll give them credit though because plenty of companies have prob tried similar tactics (e.g. uloop comes to mind), but haven't turned it into much) another semi-related one that stands out is how i've heard the reddit founders originated the conversation from a number of fictitious accounts and once the conversation picked up around them, they just let it take off on a life of it's own.

Zakuzaa 15y ago
Reddit's way of solving the chicken-n-egg problem looks relatively much OK to me. It's tolerable even if it's deceiving. It's an acceptable way of kickstarting a community, IMO.
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kn0thing 15y ago
Steve and I did submit on reddit for the first few weeks after launch under multiple usernames (there were no comments or self-posts, so it was just link submissions). We also asked friends & family to use the site, and a few of them did, but we had to go beyond our limited personal network to ensure new and interesting links on the front page every morning. Fortunately, we only had to do it for a few weeks and there was enough momentum after that for us to just routinely post under our proper account names.
- kwis 15y ago
  You didn't spam anybody. You didn't go against anybody's explicitly stated contact preferences. You didn't even represent yourself as real identifiable people, since the whole site was built to support nicks and personas. I've never taken any issue with what you did.
rakkhi 15y ago
When faced with the option of clean ethical obscurity vs. slightly dodgy chance of success are we surprised that most humans choose the latter?
temphn 15y ago
Right. Not just b2c, but every country in the world was formed by people who killed the previous inhabitants, took their land, and set up a new system of laws. Afterwards they set up myths about how great and moral they were. But the birth of anything great involves struggle and disruption. If AirBnB wasn't great, sure, then what they did wouldn't be worth it it. There has to be room for breaking small rules to build big things. Very few real entrepreneurs will disagree with this -- anyone who gets morally/ethically sniffy in public about raiding a bad service (Craigslist)to build a far better one (AirBnB) is either acting or someone who's never had a controversial thought in their lives. You cannot build something truly disruptive if you are scared to disrupt any rules. Be prepared for resistance and make sure that what you build is worth it. But the ends really do justify the means.
jmtame 15y ago
Interesting excerpt from Startups Open Sourced on this: Q: How long did it take to get the beta version of reddit built? I think we launched in June, a little less than a month after we got started. It was a really rough version of the site and it was basically a version that we just finally got online because it was tough. It's not like there were a lot of people clamoring to see what we were about to do. We were just two random kids out of UVA. There were people who were curious to see what Y Combinator was going to produce, and it helped being the first YC company to launch. To get that initial traction we benefited from those Paul Graham fans that were just curious about what Paul was doing, what YC was doing, and Paul made sure to mention us whenever he was talking about Y Combinator. A couple of his early essays helped out because he would link to us and, certainly, having Paul Graham readers as your first users on a social news website is a great asset, because the links that they are going to submit are generally high quality and pretty thoughtful and so it sets the tone very nicely. As for growing it outside of that, I begged a lot of my friends and I definitely emailed that old list of folks from that PHPBB forum, announcing it. But the rest of it was just a lot of grunt work. Every time someone wrote a blog entry about reddit—and this is, of course, pre-Twitter—good or bad, I was going to leave a comment there and engage them, talk to them, make a note of them. I just worked my way up the food chain, so to speak. The funny thing is, nowadays, TechCrunch is considered the place to launch your site. reddit never got a single mention on TechCrunch until the day we got acquired. I always stress to startups that they shouldn't be building and working for TechCrunch appearances because those don't really mean anything in the end. You can still have a successful startup without ever having a write-up on TechCrunch, for instance. Q: Did you build fake accounts to get user growth early on? Yes, I've said this publicly, usually to some laughter. It certainly helped. This was also one of those things that fell within the purview of the non-technical founder. Steve made this nifty little way—a form field—for us to just type in a random username that came to mind, along with the URL, and the title, and that's who it would be submitted by. That definitely helped, but it really only mattered for the first three weeks, and then there was some point when Steve and I didn't actually have to do anything, and we were so thrilled. We didn't have to submit or vote; there was no commenting back then. The site just worked, and the trick with a social site, especially one like reddit, is: if people come to it and it's empty, the incentive for them to want to contribute to it is really, really low, especially when it's a totally new thing. Even now, when new reddits are created all the time, it's really tough to feel interested in submitting to a lonely, empty new reddit, but once there is a little bit of momentum, once there's a few new users, there is some social proof and this is now what, six years later? Back then you show someone an empty reddit and they just see a blank website and they can't even comprehend what or why they should ever consider participating in this, so I really have no qualms about having done that, in the beginning. It would have been a different story if we had commenting and I was writing comments like, “What a brilliant comment, Alexis, your genius is unmatched!” That would have been crossing the line. And obviously fake.
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galuggus 15y ago
"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime" replace fortune with b2c startup and crime with spam Apologies to Balzac

Zakuzaa 15y ago

Reddit's way of solving the chicken-n-egg problem looks relatively much OK to me. It's tolerable even if it's deceiving. It's an acceptable way of kickstarting a community, IMO.

deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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kn0thing 15y ago

Steve and I did submit on reddit for the first few weeks after launch under multiple usernames (there were no comments or self-posts, so it was just link submissions). We also asked friends & family to use the site, and a few of them did, but we had to go beyond our limited personal network to ensure new and interesting links on the front page every morning. Fortunately, we only had to do it for a few weeks and there was enough momentum after that for us to just routinely post under our proper account names.

kwis 15y ago
You didn't spam anybody. You didn't go against anybody's explicitly stated contact preferences. You didn't even represent yourself as real identifiable people, since the whole site was built to support nicks and personas. I've never taken any issue with what you did.

rakkhi 15y ago

When faced with the option of clean ethical obscurity vs. slightly dodgy chance of success are we surprised that most humans choose the latter?

temphn 15y ago

Right. Not just b2c, but every country in the world was formed by people who killed the previous inhabitants, took their land, and set up a new system of laws. Afterwards they set up myths about how great and moral they were. But the birth of anything great involves struggle and disruption. If AirBnB wasn't great, sure, then what they did wouldn't be worth it it. There has to be room for breaking small rules to build big things. Very few real entrepreneurs will disagree with this -- anyone who gets morally/ethically sniffy in public about raiding a bad service (Craigslist)to build a far better one (AirBnB) is either acting or someone who's never had a controversial thought in their lives. You cannot build something truly disruptive if you are scared to disrupt any rules. Be prepared for resistance and make sure that what you build is worth it. But the ends really do justify the means.

jmtame 15y ago

Interesting excerpt from Startups Open Sourced on this: Q: How long did it take to get the beta version of reddit built? I think we launched in June, a little less than a month after we got started. It was a really rough version of the site and it was basically a version that we just finally got online because it was tough. It's not like there were a lot of people clamoring to see what we were about to do. We were just two random kids out of UVA. There were people who were curious to see what Y Combinator was going to produce, and it helped being the first YC company to launch. To get that initial traction we benefited from those Paul Graham fans that were just curious about what Paul was doing, what YC was doing, and Paul made sure to mention us whenever he was talking about Y Combinator. A couple of his early essays helped out because he would link to us and, certainly, having Paul Graham readers as your first users on a social news website is a great asset, because the links that they are going to submit are generally high quality and pretty thoughtful and so it sets the tone very nicely. As for growing it outside of that, I begged a lot of my friends and I definitely emailed that old list of folks from that PHPBB forum, announcing it. But the rest of it was just a lot of grunt work. Every time someone wrote a blog entry about reddit—and this is, of course, pre-Twitter—good or bad, I was going to leave a comment there and engage them, talk to them, make a note of them. I just worked my way up the food chain, so to speak. The funny thing is, nowadays, TechCrunch is considered the place to launch your site. reddit never got a single mention on TechCrunch until the day we got acquired. I always stress to startups that they shouldn't be building and working for TechCrunch appearances because those don't really mean anything in the end. You can still have a successful startup without ever having a write-up on TechCrunch, for instance. Q: Did you build fake accounts to get user growth early on? Yes, I've said this publicly, usually to some laughter. It certainly helped. This was also one of those things that fell within the purview of the non-technical founder. Steve made this nifty little way—a form field—for us to just type in a random username that came to mind, along with the URL, and the title, and that's who it would be submitted by. That definitely helped, but it really only mattered for the first three weeks, and then there was some point when Steve and I didn't actually have to do anything, and we were so thrilled. We didn't have to submit or vote; there was no commenting back then. The site just worked, and the trick with a social site, especially one like reddit, is: if people come to it and it's empty, the incentive for them to want to contribute to it is really, really low, especially when it's a totally new thing. Even now, when new reddits are created all the time, it's really tough to feel interested in submitting to a lonely, empty new reddit, but once there is a little bit of momentum, once there's a few new users, there is some social proof and this is now what, six years later? Back then you show someone an empty reddit and they just see a blank website and they can't even comprehend what or why they should ever consider participating in this, so I really have no qualms about having done that, in the beginning. It would have been a different story if we had commenting and I was writing comments like, “What a brilliant comment, Alexis, your genius is unmatched!” That would have been crossing the line. And obviously fake.

deleted 15y ago

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galuggus 15y ago

"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime" replace fortune with b2c startup and crime with spam Apologies to Balzac