How could they have attracted the first critical few thousand users without leveraging an existing audience?
Borrow someone else's existing audience.
There are a couple ways to do this. The most straightforward is literally asking them for it. Somewhat surprisingly, people do say "yes" to this. (Joel Spolsky had a subreddit back in the early days, to share links with his fans. </trivia>)
There are various flavors of this in many services. Lady Gaga says all good little monsters follow her on Twitter, etc.
There are, of course, less savory options. The go-to option for many people is spamming Craigslist.
When you get right down to it, all marketing is finding an audience that someone else has, and borrowing it. If I'm buying AdWords ads, it's Google's audience, if I'm getting press in the NYT, it's theirs, if I'm putting up billboards in the middle of London, it's the M4's traffic into the city.
The key is threefold: 1. audience interest & profile compatibility, 2. clear conversion points, and 3. a UVP.
Breaking those down:
1. What you're pushing out, and the interests of the audience, have to be aligned. So if you're launching a new HN-style area, you need to know who your audience are (probably dissatisfied HN-ers, some people from Reddit, programmers etc), and identify where those people are (HN, GitHub, Engadget, Bit-tech, Twitter...) and how you can reach them (ad platforms, publicity on blogs that they read, referrals, recommendations from trusted sources).
Understanding your users is key, both in being able to find them, and being able to serve them when they reach you.
2. Know what your points of conversion are. Is it getting someone on to the site? Is it having them sign up for something? Registering an account? Downloading something? Leaving comments? Starting threads? All these things are valid conversions, but it's important to know which ones you want to look at, and which ones are just going to be distractions.
Also, what are you going to do with this data? How about setting up a notifier for your first 250 users, when you reach that point, so you can email them all in person and thank them for coming along? Think about what you want to do with the data you collect, before you collect it. Data without purpose is just time invested for no gain.
3. What's your UVP (Unique Value Proposition)? Why should people come to you instead of wherever else is available? Audience quality? Signal to Noise ratio? Curation of content? Design? Features? What's the benefit that you offer over someone else?
If you can't convey this clearly, you're going to have problems. It's rare to get something like Twitter's early days where downtime and a confusing message is overcome by audience enthusiasm and the community doing your messaging for you. Ensure that you know what you want to tell people, and how you're going to do it.
That's a great contribution and really worthy of a blog post in it's own right.
But what's with the first (single word) paragraph? It seemed to me as particularly arrogant... really threw me off. I'm sure I misunderstood you intention, but it almost prevented me from reading the rest of what you had to say.
"This" as the start of a reply is shorthand for "the comment I'm replying to makes a very good point that I agree with entirely" (and usually "and here's my take on what (s)he wrote"), rather than "what you are about to read is the answer you are looking for".
It is a +1 mechanism for places that don't have voting, so far as I can tell. I have seen it quite often over on reddit. It used to be rather frowned upon here but the removal of visible vote numbers is likely to encourage it.
Basically what stonemetal said. With no vote count, it's a visual indication that I'm in agreement with what the person I'm replying to has said, and extending upon it.
Another way would be to create a lot of captivating content, capturing their email addresses, and turn all those readers into the audience. So give them something they want to read first, then make them communicate w/ each other. Or make sure the social network you want to create has value even if there's NOONE else in it.
You can also troll around in related forums and just start personal relationships with people. Start your own curated newsletter.
I also would recommend scraping fake posts from forums rather than coming up with your own. Put fake usernames, etc. Otherwise it ain't gonna be scalable. I rather invest my time in marketing than creating fake discussions.
"I also would recommend scraping fake posts from forums rather than coming up with your own. Put fake usernames"
Not this.
I agree with the first two paragraphs. But scraping content and removing attribution is unethical.
Over the years I have heard many anecdotes of successful startups doing shady things in their early days. [1] It makes me think this is an industry norm. Do what it takes to succeed.The ends justify the means. (As long as it's just a white collar crime.)
Am I in the minority for noticing this? Or for caring to the point of construing an action such as content scraping without attribution as going down an ethical slippery slope? Do other entrepreneurs consider this viewpoint as being weak and uncompetitive?
More than any of my other comments, I'm hoping to get replies here rather than silent views or votes.
[1] Facebook and the Social Network has been the most sensationalized. But for my argument, let's remove instances of intra-company squabbles. They are often he said, she said; a company's interactions with the public should be easier to interpret.
Content scraping happens all the time, and the benefits outweigh the risks (worst that happens is a cease and desist). If the alternative is investing lots of time creating fake users and fake discussions, I rather scrape and use that precious time for marketing. The content you're scraping technically isn't copyrighted by the website - it's user generated content.
Borrow someone else's existing audience.
There are a couple ways to do this. The most straightforward is literally asking them for it. Somewhat surprisingly, people do say "yes" to this. (Joel Spolsky had a subreddit back in the early days, to share links with his fans. </trivia>)
There are various flavors of this in many services. Lady Gaga says all good little monsters follow her on Twitter, etc.
There are, of course, less savory options. The go-to option for many people is spamming Craigslist.