Launch Lessons: How Tinder, Reddit, Airbnb, Etsy and Uber got their first users

Every great company started with zero users. Even the tech giants we know today like Facebook, Google, and Amazon had to acquire their first users just like any other startup. But how exactly did some of today‘s most disruptive companies get off the ground in their earliest days?

As a full-stack developer working on pre-launch strategy for a real estate startup, I dug into the origin stories of five major tech companies – Tinder, Reddit, Airbnb, Etsy, and Uber. What I found was a set of clever, resourceful, and sometimes surprising tactics that offer valuable lessons for any entrepreneur looking to launch a new product or service.

Airbnb‘s Localization Strategy

Before Airbnb became a global platform for short-term home rentals, it started with a much simpler idea. Founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia noticed that a big design conference was coming to San Francisco, and all the hotels were sold out. So they bought a few air mattresses and rented out space in their living room to conference attendees.

This hyperlocal approach – targeting a specific event in a single city – became key to Airbnb‘s early customer acquisition strategy. The founders would identify major events that caused hotel shortages, like conferences and festivals, and market their air mattress rentals to attendees. It worked surprisingly well, attracting a diverse group of early adopters beyond the hip millennials they expected.

As Airbnb expanded to new cities, localization remained central. Rather than trying to be everywhere at once, they focused on fully saturating one market before moving onto the next. This allowed them to build critical mass, generate word of mouth, and become the go-to short-term rental option in each city before expanding.

Airbnb also got creative with leveraging existing platforms. In a famous growth hack, they offered users an easy way to cross-post their Airbnb listings to Craigslist. While this seems simple, it was technically quite challenging, requiring them to reverse engineer Craigslist‘s posting flow. But it tapped Airbnb into Craigslist‘s huge user base and helped supply keep up with demand.

Reddit‘s "Fake It Till You Make It" Approach

Reddit is now a top discussion site, but in its earliest days, its biggest problem was lack of content. When you visited reddit.com, there was hardly anything to read or discuss. Co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian came up with a clever solution – they simply faked it.

Using dozens of fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian flooded Reddit with tons of links and engaged in "discussions" with themselves via their alts. To outside visitors, it looked like an active, vibrant community. This façade bought them time to attract real users and for organic activity to start growing.

Interestingly, by roleplaying different personas in their fake discussions, Huffman and Ohanian were also able to shape the tone they wanted for their future community. So those fake accounts didn‘t just solve the chicken-and-egg problem – they imprinted Reddit‘s DNA from the very beginning. Pretty clever for a site that now prides itself on authenticity.

Outside of engineering, Huffman and Ohanian‘s only marketing budget was $500 for stickers featuring Reddit‘s alien mascot, Snoo. They plastered these everywhere and gave them out at meetups. It sounds quaint, but that cute alien branding created affinity that paid dividends down the line.

Etsy‘s Community-First Approach

While Airbnb and Reddit had to drum up their own initial supply and demand, Etsy had the good fortune of an existing community telling them exactly what they wanted. Etsy‘s founders were web designers doing a site for a crafting forum called getcrafty.com. In redesigning the site, they interacted extensively with its 10,000 users to understand their needs – and kept hearing that they wanted a marketplace to sell their handmade goods.

Around the same time, Etsy found Crafster.org, another crafting community with over 100,000 users. Between these two forums, they realized there was a big, unmet need for an online artisan marketplace. So they built one, and getcrafty and Crafster members became Etsy‘s earliest adopters.

Once they launched, the Etsy team went above and beyond to support their initial sellers – not just online, but in person at craft fairs across the country. They recognized that helping sellers succeed was ultimately key to Etsy‘s success. A key differentiator was that Etsy allowed sellers to accept credit cards at a time when that was rare for independent artisans. By solving pain points for sellers, Etsy cultivated fierce loyalty and word of mouth.

Uber‘s High-Touch, High-Quality Approach

Like Airbnb, Uber started hyperlocal – with just three cars in San Francisco. Co-founder Travis Kalanick actually went out and recruited the initial drivers himself, cold calling black car services and offering a $30/hour guarantee to try Uber out.

In the early days, Uber was a black car service, not a peer-to-peer ridesharing network. They differentiated by being much more convenient and tech-forward than traditional car services. At a time when most black cars had to be reserved far in advance by phone, Uber let you hail one in just a few taps on your smartphone.

To attract initial riders, Uber used promotions like free rides during high-profile events in the tech-savvy San Francisco market. They obsessed over making the experience as seamless as possible, betting that riders would become evangelists after experiencing its magic. They were right – word of mouth drove explosive organic growth in those early days with almost no traditional marketing.

As Uber expanded into new cities, they used a playbook similar to their initial SF launch – aggressive driver recruitment, free rides for high-value customers, and a focus on wow-ing users. Even as they scaled, they never sacrificed that convenience and quality that hooked their early riders.

Tinder‘s Party Strategy

Tinder focused on college campuses for its initial user acquisition. But in 2012 when it launched, online dating still had a stigma among young single people. To combat this, Tinder got creative with marketing that didn‘t feel like marketing.

The Tinder team organized exclusive launch parties at campuses across the US. The only way to get in? Showing the doorman you had the Tinder app downloaded. Once inside, there was a real-life version of the app where you could put stickers on photos of people you liked. It was a clever way to get Tinder on students‘ phones by making it feel like a fun game rather than a dating app.

Then they took it a step further to solve the two-sided marketplace problem. Whitney Wolfe, Tinder‘s co-founder and Head of Marketing, pitched sororities first – then showed fraternities how many cute girls were already on the app. It worked like gangbusters, triggering explosive growth on campus after campus as Wolfe replicated the party playbook across the country.

Of course, none of this would have mattered if the app wasn‘t compelling. But Tinder nailed that too with an intuitive, game-like interface and the novel swipe mechanism that made browsing profiles feel fun. That frictionless, enjoyable user experience drove sky-high engagement that kept users hooked.

Lessons for Founders

While these five companies are very different, some common themes emerge from their early growth stories:

1. Focus on a small, specific market initially. Then gradually expand concentrically outward (e.g. Airbnb targeting one conference, Tinder targeting one campus at a time).

2. Do things that don‘t scale. In the early days, you have to roll up your sleeves and brute force growth through unconventional tactics (e.g. Reddit faking content, Uber cold calling drivers). Don‘t worry about what will work at 100x scale.

3. Make your initial users REALLY happy, even if there aren‘t many of them. Delight the early evangelists and make them feel special (e.g. Tinder‘s exclusive parties, Etsy supporting sellers in person). They‘ll spread the word for you.

4. Nail the user experience before you scale. Don‘t underestimate the power of the right user interface and interaction design to drive engagement (e.g. Tinder‘s swipe, Uber‘s one-tap ride hailing). Growth is pointless if users don‘t stick around.

Ultimately, the most important lesson from these company launches is that there‘s no one "right" way. What worked for them may not work for you. But by studying their stories and extracting the principles behind their tactics, you can craft your own clever, resourceful approach to getting those crucial first users on board when you launch your next great idea.