Seven Power Hustle Stories about Early Startups
Andrew Chen wrote in his recent essay the key to the future of growth is to execute (growth tactics) thoughtfully and iteratively. Ingenious moves of growth hacking could be luck, a sparkle, a clever thought or simply persistence. You can call it hustling, bootstrapping, hacking. There are some crazy stories. Paul Graham calls it do things that do not scale. Here are 11 founders who did the unthinkable at the dawn of their startups in byte-size stories:
- Ben S. #founder of @pinterest used to sneak into Palo Alto Apple Store & change safari homepages to Pinterest until he’s kicked out. #hustle
- Adora C. brushed teeth at McDonald’s to save $. Learned how to clean like a maid to found billion dollar HomeJoy on-demand cleaning service.
- @stripe #founder brothers would personally implement Stripe on #YC batchmate’s computers to get other developers to try the product
- @Codecademy never stopped pivoting at #YC its interactive #javascript tutorial wasn’t live until the night before #startup #demoday
- #Reddit #founder once created fake accounts to boost user number in the early days of reddit
- Founder of Muse #millennial #career site was flagged as a spammer on Gmail after sending out many cold emails in an effort to up user count
- @Airbnb founders turned their loft apartment into 1st Airbnb listing to fund rent & the #startup. Ditched Craigslist for being “impersonal”
Comment and favorite if you want to read more byte-size hustle stories like these. Pss all the stories are perfectly tweetable.
Originally published on Medium
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