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Last week, I broke down the top 4 tactics consumer startups used to get their first 1,000 customers: personal outreach, paid ads, community leverage, and influencer partnerships.
Some founders got creative with high-touch tactics, like Beacons, where the team built a better looking link-in-bio page for creators before the outreach, or Pickle, where the founders DMed stylish New Yorkers to seed supply.
Others leaned into targeted distribution channels. Fora used paid ads to test demand and build a 10K+ waitlist. Fay found their first 50 dietitians in Facebook groups and layered on a peer referral requirement. Hallow partnered with niche influencers who created their own prayer series on the app, which made promotion feel organic and personal.
In today’s post, I’ll share a few more growth strategies used by top consumer startups. At the end, you’ll also get access to a more comprehensive notion database of 50+ consumer startup case studies, including how they acquired their first 1,000 customers and what their initial MVP looked like.
Let’s dive in 👇.
5/ Social Media Posting: The Organic Social Strategy
Used by 16% of startups
Working with influencers is great because you can borrow their audiences. However, sourcing and managing influencers can be challenging and costly. Instead of outsourcing the content work to influencers, many consumer startups take on this part internally and leverage organic social posting as their primary customer acquisition driver for getting the first 1000 customers.
Posting on social might sound easy but figuring out a smart mechanism to scale and achieve consistent engagement is not an easy feat.
5a/ Simplify: The First LinkedIn Post That Exploded
Product: Your entire job search powered by one profile
Current traction: 800K+ job seekers, 70M applications processed
The initial idea was simple: create a Chrome extension to help students automatically fill out job applications.
To gauge interest, the founder Michael Yan shared their MVP on LinkedIn (in fact, it was Michael’s first ever LinkedIn post), positioning it as a "common application for internships."
He was still new to the platform, without the coveted 500+ connections badge.
To everyone's surprise, it exploded overnight. The post garnered over 50,000 views and quickly built a waitlist of 2,000 eager students.
Seeing this massive initial success, he doubled down on LinkedIn and started posting daily, finding particular success with the ‘comment your email to get access to a job posting spreadsheet’ format, regularly generating tens of thousands of views per post.
Read more here.
5b/ OnlyFans: The Twitter Integration Strategy
Product: no explanation needed here… LOL
Current traction: ~$8B gross revenue per year
OnlyFans started with just 10 creators, but the initial traction was slow. However, the product team rolled out a few clever features that significantly boosted growth.
One of the key growth drivers was a tool called Fanscope, which you can think of as a live version of Cameo.
Here's how it worked:
Creator A starts a Fanscope session from their OnlyFans profile
OnlyFans automatically posts a tweet from the creator’s Twitter account (the one they used to sign up)
The tweet goes out to their followers with a link to the live session
Twitter followers click the link, sign up for OnlyFans, and access the live stream for free
Fanscope served as an effective top-of-the-funnel tool for OnlyFans creators, reducing friction for new users. It gave potential subscribers a free sneak peek at what a creator’s OnlyFans page offered, making them more likely to join.
Additionally, Fanscope gently eased users into the core product by bridging the gap between paying for OnlyFans and an existing behavior—“camming,” where users tip performers during live streams.
This viral livestream feature, combined with Twitter integration, made the platform go viral, helping many creators grow their subscriber base.
Read more here.
5c/ UGC strategy
Another way of doing organic social is UGC (user-generated content) which is a massively underpriced channel today. UGC is content created by creators that doesn't depend on an existing audience. Instead of leveraging trust, UGC plays to platform algorithms to generate views organically. Essentially, you hire UGC creators to create organic content on your brand account.
I wrote a whole playbook on this here.
6/ Press Coverage: The Breakthrough Moment Strategy
Used by 13% of startups
Sometimes months of steady growth can be eclipsed by a single viral moment or press hit. One in eight successful startups experienced major growth inflection points through press coverage.
The key isn't just getting lucky, it's being prepared to capitalize when lightning strikes.
Hopper: The NYTimes Tool That Went Viral
Product: travel booking app that helps you book at the lowest price
Current traction: $5B valuation
Hopper spent 7 years building a travel discovery website in stealth mode. It wasn't working.
Then the New York Times wrote an article about a small tool buried at the bottom of their website - a flight price prediction feature. It was a simple tool that could give you tailored advice on what day and time to book the cheapest flight ticket based on the flight route of your choice.
“Take a very popular route, like J.F.K. to Los Angeles International Airport, for which Hopper’s report uses 57 million fares quoted in the last month. Turns out you’d be crazy to book Thursday through Monday, since, according to the graph I got, you would save an average of $45 or so by booking on Wednesday (Tuesday is somewhere in the middle). ”
It went viral and Hopper’s future started looking a lot more promising.
The team decided to rally upon this viral press moment and relaunched Hopper as a mobile app that could help travelers monitor ticket prices and recommend the best time to purchase, based on billions of historical flight price data.
Not only did this viral press moment provide them with their initial few thousand signups, but it also helped them refocus their direction on a new product with bigger growth potential.
Read more here.
7/ Ambassador Programs: The Systematic Word-of-Mouth Strategy
Used by 6% of startups
The most scalable form of personal outreach is turning your best customers into systematic advocates through structured ambassador programs.
Snackpass: The College Ambassador Playbook
Product: Food pickup app
Current traction: 500K+ customers, $60M+ GMV
Kevin and his team adopted the growth playbook used by Facebook and Tinder by building a college ambassador program.
They experimented with this strategy by hiring over 60 brand ambassadors all over Yale Campus to promote Snackpass. They tried many different angles, from partnering with sororities, athletic teams, to campus groups, and they gave away tons of free gifts, merchandise for people to try out the app.
They wrote down all the key learnings in a Google doc and created a replicable playbook for other campuses.
This program helped them to grow to 10 campuses, achieving over $10M in GMV and 25% month-over-month growth by 2019 - accomplishing all with 8 employees.
Read more here.
9/ Crowdfunding: The Validation and Momentum Strategy
Used by 6% of startups
Crowdfunding platforms aren't just about raising money - they're powerful customer acquisition and validation tools that can jumpstart your growth.
Inkbox: Funding + Customer Acquisition
Product: temporary tattoo
Traction: acquired by BIC for $65M
Getting funding for consumer products is tough. So the Handley brothers turned to Kickstarter, which ended up being a killer customer acquisition channel.
They launched their campaign on July 14, 2015. Within two weeks, they hit their $40K goal. By August 14, they blew past their stretch goal and hit $180K. In total, they raised nearly $300K from over 7,500 backers.
The campaign also went viral: 100+ press mentions, 100K+ Facebook shares, and it drove the majority of their first 50,000 orders.
Read more here.
9/ 50+ tactics, yours to steal 🫡
Instead of stopping at the 8 strategies I just covered, I went a step further and put together a full Notion database on how 50+ top consumer startups got their first 1,000 customers.
It includes their exact growth tactics, what their MVP looked like, and is sorted by industry so you can easily find what’s most relevant to you.
Skim it, steal from it, build faster.
—
See you next week,
Leo
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