[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 :)