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How Tinder, LinkedIn, and Reddit Tricked Their Way Past the Cold Start Problem

By Alexis Ohanian · Leadership · 2 min read

Your product might be perfect. But without users, it's worthless. Here's how three giants faked it til they made it.

Key Points

Tinder threw a college party and required the app to get in -- 500 users in one night
Reddit's founders created fake users and posted all the content themselves for months
LinkedIn targeted mid-career professionals who still needed to network, not celebrities
Paul Graham: 'The most common unscalable thing founders do is recruit users manually'

Sometimes you have all the right features. You just don't have the right network.

Tinder's Genius Bouncer Trick

Tinder nailed the product from day one. The swipe. The match. Everything worked. But nobody was using it.

Their fix? They threw a massive birthday party at USC. Bused students in. But here's the catch: you had to install Tinder and show it to the bouncer to get in. 500 of the most popular students on campus, all on the app in one night.

The next day, people checked the app to find the person they saw across the room. And Tinder took off.

Reddit Was Entirely Fake Users

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian had a homepage with nothing on it. No content. No users. Dead.

So they created fake accounts. Dozens of them. They posted all the content themselves. They wrote scripts to scrape headlines from CNN and Digg. They did this for months. One day, Steve forgot to run the script. The homepage was full anyway. Reddit had become real.

The founders literally faked an entire community until real users showed up and took over.

LinkedIn's Value Investor Approach

Reid Hoffman knew Bill Gates would never need LinkedIn. And entry-level workers had nothing to offer the network yet.

So he targeted the middle. People like Mark Pincus. Successful enough to be valuable. Hungry enough to still need connections. That middle layer attracted everyone above and below them.

LinkedIn didn't go for the top or the bottom. They found the sweet spot in the middle.

The Flintstoning Principle

Andrew Chen calls this 'Flintstoning.' Like Fred Flintstone's car, you power the machine with your own legs until the engine kicks in.

Every one of these companies used manual, unscalable, sometimes embarrassing tactics to get their first users. Then they let go once the community could sustain itself.

You only Flintstone for a while. Then you let go and let the network carry itself.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham said it best. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do is recruit users by hand.

You can't wait for them to find you. Especially when nobody knows your name. Throw parties. Create fake accounts. Go through your address book one by one. Whatever it takes to get your first 100.

Your first 100 users will never come from a marketing campaign. They come from hustle.