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Some examples: - The Airbnb founders took photographs for listings themselves. - ProductHunt started out as a newsletter, with the founders themselves hunting
by ignoramous 3y ago
Some examples:
- The Airbnb founders took photographs for listings themselves.
- ProductHunt started out as a newsletter, with the founders themselves hunting and curating products.
- Reddit founders submitted links (wrote comments?) everyday using different usernames, to get the community going.
- Dropbox launched with a video demonstration and an email signup page to gauge viability. The product wouldn't be ready for another year, iirc.
- Doordash was a single webpage with a phone number (and 5 students?), serving just Palo Alto.
- Meesho was a WhatsApp group (one of the few teams in the batch that failed to raise money on Demo Day, afaik).
- Segment was a single javascript file viz. analytics.js.
- giarc 3y agoFurther to your doordash example, I believe many of delivery sites simply took the online order, then called the restaurant themself to order the food. This however lead to some issues where restaurants were getting from complaints from customers they didn't know they had. They also had different pricing from the online companies.
- throwawaysleep 3y agoDoesn’t DoorDash still do that?
- giancarlostoro 3y agoNot sure if they still do, but they definitely integrate more directly now.
- flir 3y agoBack in the stone age, lastminute.com would fax individual customer's details through to the theatre so they could pick up their tickets at the box office.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago> - ProductHunt started out as a newsletter, with the founders themselves hunting and curating products. I can't remember if it was product hunt or not, but there was one such site that actually started as a way for the developer to feed attention to their other startup. Turned out producthunt (or whatever one I'm thinking of) became successful instead.
- 101008 3y agoFeedMyApp? It was way before, though. Circa 2007/2008?
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI only recall a thread here on HN from the founder
- vecter 3y agoThis is a great list. I could be wrong but I believe that some early version of Dropbox was usable not too long after the demo.
- yencabulator 3y ago> - Reddit founders submitted links (wrote comments?) everyday using different usernames, to get the community going. Can we please not celebrate scammy behavior?
- scubbo 3y agoI mean....if the content is there, and people found it engaging enough to want to interact with it, is it really scammy? _Dishonest_ is probably a fair descriptor of presenting the content as coming from more people than actually were (and if those "usage numbers" were presented as actual usage numbers for, like, VC funding, then it's an out-and-out scam), but I don't think it's really _that_ much of a scam as-presented. If someone told me tomorrow that all of the content I'd read on Hacker News for the last month had all been provided by one extremely prolific person with a bunch of sockpuppets, rather than by multiple actual real human people, it wouldn't reduce the value or enjoyment I'd got from them.
- humanrebar 3y agoMaybe we need to agree to disagree, but I find dishonesty scummy. And I would find invented discussions less engaging.
- scubbo 3y agoThe flipped vowel is extraordinarily relevant! I agree that it's scummy, but not scammy. > And I would find invented discussions less engaging I would predict that I would, too - but, evidence suggests that it was engaging enough to get people interested, so maybe our predictions are incorrect.
- justanotherjoe 3y agothe truth doesnt need to be defended cause the truth is no one, and it doesnt care to be defended. The one you should defend is common good. And truths as when they pertain to common good.
- taneq 3y ago
- ekianjo 3y ago> - Reddit founders submitted links (wrote comments?) everyday using different usernames, to get the community going. clearly unethical behavior, but whatever...
- emblaegh 3y agoHow would this be unethical in reddit's case? It's not like they tried to raise money from investors or users using the faked activity.
- ekianjo 3y agoDeceiving early days users. Since when lying is OK?
- mdorazio 3y agoWhat did they lie about? People on Reddit and right here on HN use multiple accounts all the time (look at all the throwaway accounts).
- ekianjo 3y agothrowaway is very explicit, there's no lie involved since everyone knows what it means. > What did they lie about? Fake users being piloted by the same person behind the screen. If that's not a lie, then I don't know what is.
- sbarre 3y agogeez, if that's your biggest complaint about discussion forums, you live a pretty blessed life. We're talking about Internet discussion forums here.. The amount of fakery, lying, bullshit and outright awfulness that happens on forums every single day across the whole Internet is staggering. If they used aliases to kickstart discussions and try to get people involved and contributing, I'm not sure that's something to get your pitchfork out about.
- 3y ago