How 100 Startups Acquired Their First Users
Hi, this is Anand from BridgeURL.com, a simple app that lets you curate hundreds or even thousands of links and share them with one URL. Here, I have curated the stories of 100 startups about how they acquired their earliest customers. If you are a startup marketer, I hope this is of value.
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AutoGrow
The first year in starting a business is usually a toughest. My experience was no exception, and whe...
www.autogrow.co
BackBlaze
There are a variety of methods to attract your first 1,000 customers, but launching with the press i...
www.backblaze.com
Baremetrics
How do you go from "no one on earth knows I exist" to "dozens of people I don't know are now giving ...
baremetrics.com
Buffer
Could guest posts be your secret path to earning big traffic and monthly revenue? Leo Widrich, co-fo...
www.searchenginewatch.com
BuySellAds
BuySellAds Founder, Todd Garland Shares his Startup Story and Learning from His 1st Entrepreneurial ...
foundora.com
BuzzFeed
If you saw #TheDress debate float by your screen (and who didn’t?), that was a prime example of vi...
growthhackers.com
Calendly
Here's how Calendly had to ‘flip the funnel’ in order to scale growth to massive heights in only...
neilpatel.com
Canva
From the unlikeliest of places, Melanie Perkins grew design app Canva into one of the most valuable ...
www.forbes.com
CD Baby
CDBaby* is an online distributor of independent music. Founded by well-known entrepreneur Derek Siv...
searchengineland.com
Chanty
Software as a service products are touch and go in the startup world. If you can't get enough users ...
www.leadfuze.com
ClickFunnels
Want to learn how ClickFunnels -- a little startup in Boise Idaho -- became one of the fastest growi...
www.clickfunnels.com
ConversionXL
Please meet my friend Peep Laja who I met years ago when he created his first failed startup. He sub...
okdork.com
ConvertKit
Hey there! My name is Nathan Barry and I run ConvertKit, an email marketing company for professional...
www.indiehackers.com
CrazyEgg
Hiten Shah built three successful startups (Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, and FYI). Here’s how he got hi...
www.growthramp.io
Discord
Move over Slack - Discord is king of the chat apps. Here's how word-of-mouth grew Discord to 250 mil...
www.referralcandy.com
Dollar Shave Club
The surprising success of Dollar Shave Club provides an important case study in scaling storytelling...
www.convinceandconvert.com
DoorDash
The founders had already spent months building an app for a different idea. To test out DoorDash, th...
www.productdone.com
DropBox
Drew Houston is featured on the cover of Forbes magazine as the entrepreneur who out-Steve Jobs’ed...
techcrunch.com
Envato
Since Envato launched FlashDen, its first digital marketplace the company has grown to include eight...
foundr.com
Etsy
Etsy provides a fascinating look at a company who found traction among a very passionate and idealis...
growthhackers.com
Eventbrite
Eventbrite has grown from $0 to $10 billion in ticket sales. So how did this husband and wife foundi...
www.drift.com
Evernote
Evernote has never been sexy, almost ran out of money, and doesn’t benefit from the network effect...
growthhackers.com
Fiverr
By starting small and specific, Fiverr’s entrepreneurs built a freelance marketplace worth million...
www.fastcompany.com
Grindr
It’s hard to talk about dating in the modern age without mentioning dating apps.
www.verdict.co.uk
Groove
Many startups die trying to find early traction. Here’s how we survived and got our first 100 payi...
www.groovehq.com
Grubhub
Grubhub may not be a household name worldwide like Google & Facebook, but it has much to teach entre...
www.fatbit.com
Gumroad
Hi! My name is Sahil Lavingia. I run a small company called Gumroad, where we ship a super-simple e-...
www.indiehackers.com
HelpScout
With so much focus among startups on hyper-growth, it’s refreshing to see a company that deliberat...
medium.com
- The social photo sharing app won 100,00 users within a week of launching and now has 4.25 million ...
www.psfk.com
Intercom
Startups need paying customers. So where did our users come from? Intercom's early customers came fr...
www.intercom.comJitbit
Hi, my name is Alex Yumashev. I'm a full stack developer and the founder of Jitbit — my side proje...
www.indiehackers.com
Jotform
This is the moment you’ve dreamed about. Your product is finished. Beta testers are happy and i...
www.jotform.com
Kapwing
About three weeks ago, Patrick McKenzie of Stripe published an article on how to get your first ten ...
www.kapwing.com
King of Maids
Most people wait for the perfect moment which never comes. What happens instead is that you learn ab...
www.bookingkoala.com
Kinsta
Check out the lessons we learned during our bootstrapping journey, and how we turned our startup int...
kinsta.com
LeadFeeder
How to achieve "organic" growth when hiring salespeople is not an option: the lessons Leadfeeder's t...
blog.chartmogul.com
LiveChat
Having grown from its humble Polish roots, LiveChat has become one of the leading live chat software...
medium.com
Lyft
When John Zimmer and Logan Green launched a new ride-sharing service called Lyft in the spring of 20...
techcrunch.com
MailChimp
Ben Chestnut and his team at MailChimp built an amazing business and became Inc.'s Company of the Ye...
www.inc.com
MindMeister
At 7 PM on February 7, 2007, MindMeister went live in private beta. Today, we have almost 4 million ...
techcrunch.com
Miro
While there has been no rocket or viral growth for us yet, we gain a steady stream of new users ever...
neilpatel.com
Name2Email (Reply)
I’m going to share with you how to get on Product Hunt and more importantly how we got $50R in Ext...
reply.io
NameCheap
We sat down with Richard Kirkendall, CEO of Namecheap, to discuss Namecheap's origins and what he se...
www.namecheap.com
Nasty Gal
Nasty Gal is one of the most successful ecommerce brands of the last five years, capturing the imagi...
growthhackers.com
NextDoor
This weekend, we went back to where it all started for Nextdoor – our first neighborhood: Nextdoo...
blog.nextdoor.com
Nomad List
It’s been a crazy two weeks. I just launched my 4th startup called Nomad List as part of my goal t...
levels.io
Oberlo
In this episode we talk with Oberlo co-founder Tomas Slimas. Before launching Oberlo, Tomas was a dr...
www.oberlo.com
PageCloud
A little over a year ago I watched Craig Fitzpatrick present his company PageCloud on stage at TechC...
www.startupsense.net
Pandora
After a decade of near-death experiences, the Internet music service is attracting attention from in...
www.nytimes.com
ParseHub
ParseHub, our visual web scraping tool, launched in September 2014. We had our first 10 paying cust...
www.parsehub.com
Penji
Here is exactly how we achieved our first milestone and give you examples, case studies, and stories...
penji.co
Pinterest is a tech company that doesn’t want to keep you online. Instead, it wants to inspire you...
www.referralcandy.com
Plenty of Fish
Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. How does he do it? He keeps thin...
www.inc.com
Powtoon
Organic growth is a wonderful thing. So are partnerships with YouTube, Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesfo...
www.inc.com
QuackQuack
Ravi Mittal, founder & CEO at QuackQuack breakdowns the hacks to reach your million users in a sures...
inc42.com
Quora
How did a knowledge database become the hottest website of the year? By having Dennis Crowley, Danie...
www.wired.co.uk
Before Reddit became the revolutionary powerhouse of truth, justice, and random acts of pizza, it wa...
venturebeat.com
Shazam
“The number one determinant of entrepreneurial success is persistence. If you are not prepared to ...
medium.com
Shopify
When Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake decided to build an online store in 2004, they had no idea they wo...
producthabits.com
SlideShare
Rashmi Sinha left a PhD program in cognitive neuropsychology to become an entrepreneur. Having been ...
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
SmartBlogger
This guest post is by Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger (formerly Boost Blog Traffic) After all, that’s ...
problogger.com
SnapChat
Yes, we all know about the app's recreational uses. But its initial popularity came from a more prac...
www.inc.com
Spotify
In 2006, the landscape of the music industry was very different from what it is today. Peer-to-peer ...
producthabits.com
Square
By combining an elegant integrated payments system with a distinctive conversation-triggering piece ...
growthhackers.com
Stack Overflow
The founders had large communities of existing followers from their previous online endeavors
meta.stackexchange.com
Standuply
First, we had a business idea. Then in two years, we built a fast-growing business with 500 customer...
standuply.com
Stripe
Stripe was originally called "/dev/payments" before it raised funding from Peter Thiel and Elon Musk
vator.tv
SurveySparrow
How we got our first 1000+ customers within 50 days of launch. We genuinely discuss the marketing st...
surveysparrow.com
TalkSpace
Talkspace was originally called Talktala, and focused on video group therapy sessions
vator.tv
Tinder
In just two years, dating app Tinder had acquired 50 million users– each of them logging into the ...
medium.com
TransferWise
It’s no secret that the fintech space is a tough one to play in, yet TransferWise has been able to...
medium.com
Trello
In just three years, Trello increased its user base by 426% to over 25 million users. Here’s how t...
www.drift.com
Twilio
The hottest stock in America, Twilio, is a company you've never heard of. It uses the cloud to put c...
www.forbes.com
Twitch
By some measures Twitch.tv is already the fourth-highest-trafficked site in the U.S., behind only Go...
www.fastcompany.com
Udemy
How do you find your first users when building an online marketplace? Background: Gagan Biyani is th...
thehustle.co
Upworthy
Upworthy launched on March 26th, 2012, and just seven months later, they were getting almost 9 milli...
growthhackers.com
Veed.io
How we got our first 200 paid users for our SaaS app in just 6 weeks when we only had 3 months of ru...
www.veed.io
Venmo
In a world ruled by mobiles, only a hero had the power to integrate social media into boring activit...
appsamurai.com
Click here for our magazine cover story on the Facebook-WhatsApp Megadeal: The Courtship, The Secre...
www.forbes.com
Wish
Mobile eCommerce platform Wish grew to over $1 billion in revenue by targeting an underserved market...
jilt.com
Wufoo
I've never republished an old interview, but after reading Kara Swisher's post about Wufoo's sale to...
mixergy.com
Zapier
Wade Foster on Zapier’s unusual beta program, getting new users and building a successful remote t...
www.groovehq.com
Zenefits
Zenefits's free software is changing the way small companies manage HR--and a lot of insurance broke...
www.inc.com
Zomato
Success story of Deepinder Goyal, founder of Asia’s Largest Restaurant Guide - "Zomato". Read to k...
www.yosuccess.com
Zoom
Join Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan and SaaStr COO Mallun Yen as they delve into the secrets of Zoom...
www.saastr.com