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- Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users
Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users
“We started working on [Discord] in January 2015, and within I’d say two months, some of our friends were very excited about it but we didn’t really have any users. It was pretty clear they wanted to use it, it just wasn’t exactly correct. We rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example. But I’d say within 3-4 months, we had 20 DAU that weren’t us.”
However, as Jason explains, growth stalled after those first 20 users:
“We were like, ‘How do we get the word out?’ Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, ‘This is the dumbest idea ever, no one is going to use this.’ And even people who played games, many of them thought, ‘Why would I want this? I already have whatever app I’m using.’ And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it.”
Jason recalls a period of 3-4 weeks sitting around thinking, “We like this, but maybe no one else does.”
Then they figured out their growth unlock:
“The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app, as opposed to saying, ‘Try this thing out we’re selling to you.’ What we actually did was we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit, and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this new voice over IP app. What do y’all think about it?’”
Jason continues:
“People found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. And they went back to the subreddit and were like, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool.’ We got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day and it sort of started to snowball. And then we did this playbook for six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.”