Discord's first cohort of users came from the final fantasy XIV subreddit - after a friend of the cofounder posted there after trying out the app.

In 2012, Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder, was honest enough to attribute Reddit's initial ability to attract new users to their fake user strategy first of all. Even while they were doing that, he said, they still needed a few months to get the site self-sustaining so they could stop faking user engagement.

At Yahoo, new properties were announced on internal employee lists and it was requested that say 500 employees would seed the new service so it didn't look like a ghost town.

The Spiegel used a similar strategy at the beginning. The founder didn't have any money to hire people, but knew that a magazine written by only one guy wouldn't be taken seriously, so he just published his own writing under different names.

Square's cash app grew fast to 50 million users by giving away $5 to each new user referred.

very insightful, thank you for sharing this! Let me let this ramble in my brain!