First 1000 - 👾 Reddit
establishing trust through fake users, launching before you are ready and everything you didn't know about how Reddit got their very first customers.
Hello folks 👋, First of all, I would like to welcome the 3,789 new members to our little family 👨🏽🍼 since our last update (about a month back). First1000 is now over 18,000 members strong 💃. Today, I'm teaming up with Jason Yoong (Head of Voice of Customer Voice Program @ Amazon and author of Curious Expeditions ) to tackle the Reddit Case Study. Reddit's history is rich; it is both the first YC company to launch and the first significant acquisition for a YC company. As I am writing this, I realized this is the 10th case study we do on a company that started in the dorm room (we previously covered Snapchat, Tinder, Stitch Fix, Doordash, DoNotPay, Morning Brew, Snackpass, Superpowered, Stripe). What is interesting about this one, unlike all the other student-founded companies we covered, Reddit did not piggyback off the concentrated social circles on university campuses for their launch…for how they acquired their first customer and more….let’s jump right in The founding storyIn 2003, University of Virginia gaming roomies Alexis Ohanian (History Major) and Steve Huffman (CS major) were starstruck with the entrepreneurial dream. Their make-the-world-a-better-place idea at the time was a food-ordering app named mmm😋(MyMobileMenu). Alexis and Steve spent a year doing "market research," creating databases of restaurants in Virginia, traveling to entrepreneurship events all over the world, registering a company, opening a bank account...basically everything they could do except actually launching the thing. During their senior year, Steve's girlfriend told him that Paul Graham(PG) was coming to Boston to give a talk about startups during their spring break. Steve knew PG through his book On Lisp, but Alexis had no clue who Paul Graham was. Steve decided it would be worth their time to travel all the way to Boston to get his book signed and maybe learn a thing or two about how to get mmm off the ground. They packed up, traveled all the way to Boston and after Paul was done with his talk..they approached him with a Hail-Mary
Getting into YCThis coffee chat would change the lives of Alexis and Steve and make them millionaires in their early twenties. They spent the time pitching mmm(not to be confused with mmhmm) and how they were going to make waiting in line a thing of the past. PG got excited. Two hours into their conversation, Paul invited them to interview for the new startup incubator's first-ever batch he was building called YCombinator. The actual pitch went well, but did not gain enough of a traction with the investors to secure them a spot in the first-ever YC batch.
Fun Fact: Alexis drew the first Snoo (Reddit's mascot) during his senior year in college (University of Virginia), even before the company's idea. He used Illustrator and the touchpad on his laptop to draw Snoo.The launch that the founders did not know about.After spending a year researching their food delivery concept, YC and PG gave the Reddit team about 2 weeks to launch "the homepage of the internet." To take a step back, at the time, this was not an entirely green field; the competition was steep. Digg (which had a similar ambition) announced a "large" series A of $2.8m (yup, that was considered "large" back then) just as Steve and Alexis were getting started on Reddit. To add salt to injury, Digg was founded by a minor tech celebrity Kevin Rose. The deadline and pressure from YC stemmed from this competitive pressure and perhaps arguably the fact that they wanted to have some demonstrable wins from their first ever batch. At the end of the two weeks, Paul sent the cofounders a scathing email saying
Steve took the email personally and replied saying he had managed to get the fundamentals to work... and just a few weeks after, PG forced their hand to launch when he referenced Reddit in his famous What I did this summer essay, where he unleashed YC into the world.
With that unplanned launch, just a day in, Reddit got over their first 1000 user mark.
The disappointing road to 2k.Q: You know what's worse than a launch you, the founders, did not know about? A: What comes next. With no plan in mind on how to acquire users, a barely functioning website that requires powerful network effects, and a competitor breathing down your neck, the next few months were rough...to say the least. The best mechanic the founders could come up with- to Bruteforce Reddit to the critical mass- was to create fake users…..lots and lots of fake users. Every day, Alexis and Ohanian would use the admin view they created on the website, allowing them to quickly attach a new fake user to any new post they create. They posted dozens and dozens of new links everyday to make the website seem more legit than it was. On a superficial level, the hundreds of fake users lent Reddit credibility that they needed, but on a deeper level, it did two critical things: 1- It set the tone for the website. In many instances of building a company, looking for the unintended use cases of your product can be a powerful signal for future feature and product development. But on a pseudonymous community-first website, you can see how that can be problematic. Having the founder DNA firmly embedded throughout the early history of posts set the culture, the unhidden rules, and the expectation of what Reddit is very clearly and powerfully. Showing new users how they ought to use the platform is arguably a lot more effective than telling them through FAQs, guidelines, tutorials..etc. (who reads those anyway 🤷♂️) 2- Made people feel they were part of something real. With hundreds of (fake) users each having a distinct digital presence, user #003 would feel they were part of something so much bigger than they were; no one wants to be a part of a ghost town, but some, I would suspect, would love to be a part of a vibrant emerging community on the internet. Fun Fact: Some of these suspected fake users are rabble, Meegan & lampshade
This is it for today, See you next Sunday 😉, If you liked this post from First 1000, why not share it? |
Older messages
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