How to Reach Million users? Lessons from Awesome Startups

Smart people learn from their mistakes and smartest of them learn from others mistakes.And very cool startups learn from super cool startups to reach their Million users fasters, here is a Curated content from many websites and a slide presentation done by dropbox and Xobni founders on their lessons learnt.

Of Course most important thing is to have a great product and make the product which people need, fill the need and keep the consumer in Mind. Apart from all this there are some street smart techniques which these startups use which gives them an edge.

 Niche First and World Later

Facebook’s early sophisticated users were at Harvard, Yelp’s early sophisticated users were the tech-savvy crowd of San Francisco, Quora and LinkedIn’s early savvy users were the VCs and startups of Silicon Valley. Early users of Angry Bird were celebritities.

Create Buzz and exclusivity

Invite only access to websites given initially by Google+, Pinterest, Facebook and all other famous Startups. Harvad students loved exclusivity and Facebook gave them that which went global in very less time.

Fake it till you make it

Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman recently admitted that the link-sharing site was initially seeded with fake profiles posting links to simulate activity Read here .  Paypal created a bot that bought goods on eBay and then, insisted on paying for it using PayPal. Not only did sellers come to know about the service, they rushed onto it as it already seemed to be getting popular. Dating services simulate initial traction by creating fake profiles and conversations.  Aardvark manually categorized and directed questions to users initially. [Source]

Marketing – Sex it up

Inbound, Out bound marketing, Get found on Google, Social Media and Media. Tie yourself with a bigger industry Trend. Get noticed and meet  journalists.

Check out the slide presentation below for more ideas