[sriramk]

I can think of quite a few startups that used a big bang launch with press with success. Off the top of my head - Instagram (MG's series of pieces on Techcrunch), Mailbox, Flipboard, Square, Path. I get where PG is coming from but press can help bootstrap a network effect if you have none.

[pg]

One of the reasons I wrote "there may be a handful that just grew by themselves" is that every time I learn the story behind one of these apparent instant successes, it turns out it wasn't so instant. I don't know the stories of all these companies, but I do know that Instagram's launch was preceded by a lot of manual recruitment of influential users.

[sriramk]

Agreed - I don't think any of these should be used in isolation. But Kevin Systrom would tell you that recruiting photographers and influencers helped with launch because when that TC piece hit, everyone saw influencers/early adopters were already on the app, leading to a feedback loop with more 'influencers'.

[derefr]

Would you recommend that strategy--having a quiet, unmemorable, word-of-mouth-driven initial launch (which you can call a "beta period"), and then, once you've already got some hooks into the press and a good userbase, a follow-on publicity stunt (which you can call a "launch")?

[philfreo]

This worked well for us at Close.io <http://close.io.>

We had a couple "soft launches" - one where we put up our first email-collecting landing page and invited some people we knew to use the service (Sept '12). Another where we turned on self-signup on our website and invited more people (Nov '12).

Then after a couple months we had some solid active users and a small number of customers, we were also able to get 2-3 good press articles in the same week, which we now consider our official launch (Jan '13).

I think it's good advice to just keep "launching" until somebody notices :)

[tptacek]

Almost anything can help "bootstrap a network effect"; if you have a real network effect offering, every user you gain, no matter how laboriously and no matter how marginally, helps the snowball get bigger.

The point the piece is making is the difference between the actual value of launch publicity (marginal) measured against the typical founder conception of the value of that publicity (enormous).

I've "launched" a bunch of stuff in my career and that part of Graham's piece rang especially true to me.

[sriramk]

How do you measure that difference or, rather, how do you challenge the founder, who is arguably the best person to measure that? I've seen several founders attribute success to some critical piece of launch PR (often a big publication article).

Here's an esoteric example (I have a few more of these) - Qik's founders believe many years later Scoble's coverage of them was the reason for their launch being successful. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/qik-started-in-a-garage-dis...

Or the Warby Parker guys attributing their launch success to Vogue covering them (something I know they deeply believe to be true) http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/toasting-success-warby-parker...

[chubot]

But the TechCrunch pieces aren't the reason Instagram suceeded. There are plenty of companies who got TechCrunch coverage that failed (most of them).

I read stories about the Instagram founder doing a "bar test". He would show people his app in a noisy bar, with half of their attention. If they couldn't figure it out, then the app was too complicated or too hard to explain.

He also had some very unscalable experience at previous Stanford company (don't remember the name now).

The press can only explain the a product -- it doesn't make the product fit the market.

[pseut]

IIRC mailbox was a pivot from "orchestra todo," an iphone collaborative todo app that won awards on its own. You might want to check that your other "big bang launch" examples really fit that description.

[danmaz74]

But how many of those were really "initial" launches vs. a big launch after you already did a lot of legwork (while in closed beta, for example) and the planets were already well aligned?starting to wonder

[ronilan]

When asked if he would like condensed milk or honey on his bread - Winnie the Pooh said "Both, but never mind the bread".

Dropbox went to YC and to TC 50 and did "double-sided affiliation" and has a great product and and and... etc.