In Slack’s case, it was their incredible buzz within the early-adopter startup community, and their invite-only launch. There are other famous examples: The $5 referral fee that lit up the original PayPal network, or Dropbox’s demo video on Hacker News that created a huge line of folks excited to try the magical cloud-storage product. Or the “Uber Ice Cream” promotions letting people order soft-serve ice cream, on demand, via the rideshare app. In the early days, local newspapers and social media would often cover the ice cream promotion, which helped build out the rideshare network. Each of
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