Tinder Had the Perfect Product. Nobody Was On It.
Chen: Tinder basically nailed the product idea from day one. Sometimes that happens. The first version of Instagram just nailed it. The first version of Tinder just nailed it.
Chen: The problem with building all the right features is that then they went and started to invite their friends. This is at a point where online dating is a little bit of a stigma. You're texting your friends and you're almost saying, 'Hey, you seem kind of lonely, I feel like you need a boyfriend.' It's a little bit like an insult.
Chen: Sometimes you actually have all the right features. You just don't have the right network. It's very easy for them to have just stopped right there and said, 'This isn't working, let's move on.'
Sometimes you actually have all the right features. You just don't have the right network.
The Birthday Party That Launched Tinder
Chen: They realized -- how do we get everyone in the app at the same time, all in the same geography, all in one go? They could throw a birthday party. They sponsored this birthday party from one of the really popular people on the USC campus.
Chen: They required you to install Tinder and show it to the bouncer to get into the party. You wouldn't use Tinder at the party. But after the party, the next day, there were a bunch of people that maybe you saw from across the room that you didn't have a chance to talk to. So they would just check the app and off they went.
Chen: If they could get 500 people at a party -- 500 of the most desirable, hyperconnected people in the Greek system -- they could take over the whole USC campus. Then they picked another school, and another school. And they went after schools in the southern states where the Greek system is very powerful.
They required you to install Tinder and show it to the bouncer to get into the party.
LinkedIn: Find the People Still in the Grind
Chen: Reed Hoffman broke it down. At the very top of the hierarchy, you have folks like Bill Gates. Everyone wants to meet them, but someone like that is not that interested in a service that lets you network. On the other side, there's folks who are just breaking in and don't have as much value to add.
Chen: What Reed and the team did was identify the people who had seen some success but were still in the grind. Still wanted to meet people, still needed to recruit. Mark Pincus, who was starting Zynga at the time -- wasn't done with his career yet. Build LinkedIn using that base of users, and then it'll attract everybody else.
Build it using people still in the grind. Then it attracts everybody else.
Reddit: Fake Users Until Real Ones Showed Up
Chen: Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian said, 'If we don't post content to the homepage, no one's going to view it.' So they wrote scripts and made all these fake users. The fake users would just put content on the screen and fill up the homepage.
Chen: On the days they didn't run the script, the homepage would be empty and they would freak out. They would go on vacation and check the homepage -- 'Oh my God, Reddit has nothing on it.' Eventually they added scripts that would scrape the top websites, grab cool headlines from CNN, headlines from Digg, and put them all in.
Chen: Then one day Steve opened up Reddit, had forgotten to run the script, and the homepage was completely full of links. Paul Graham has an amazing essay called 'Do Things That Don't Scale.' The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is recruit users manually. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.
On the days they didn't run the script, the homepage would be empty and they would freak out.