How did they do it?

I'm just curious, how did big players like facebook and youtube get the words out in the beginning? Before they had millions users? I don't understand how they marketed it. They must have started somewhere. I can't imagine they were founded with 100K users. Any thoughts?

 

The two sites you mentioned, Facebook and YouTube, are extremely viral, so that helped a lot. Your friends tell you "MySpace sucks, join Facebook," so you join. Your friends tell you "Check out this cool video on YouTube." Plus whenever anyone finds a cool video on YouTube and wants to post it to their blog, they've got advertising there.

 

yes, that makes sense. So the numbers work like 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + ............................. 32,000,000? How would they grow so fast though?

 

The question, to me, is why youtube and facebook succeeded when thousands of similar sites did not?

I think youtube had enough of an infrastructure to handle the huge bandwidth required to host all those videos and stay online. The site had huge maintenance costs. It was no shoestrap operation.

Facebook had the advantage of starting at Harvard with lots of free labor to build out all the features. It started with the niche market of college students. College students have friends and family. College students graduate. This allowed it to grow.

Myspace took off because, initially, it targeted a niche market, musicians. Musicians have fans. The fans liked Myspace. Then they told family and friends. It just grew from there.

So, to me, unless you have HUGE $$$ for startup costs, you have to find a niche you can control. This allows you to build the infrastructure (code, servers, content, strategy) to succeed in the larger markets.

 

its about being exponential that 1 person tells 2 people then those 2 people tell to and so on and before you know it people in china are watching your vid.

 

It's a combination of viral and stickiness. Reason to spread and reason to keep coming back.

 

They have to get the right people to buzz the people. and you have to make it big. and normally they have venture capitalist behind them.

 

That's what I was thinking..