How Coinbase gave away BTC to get its first users

3️⃣ Get your users to do your marketing for you. How did Coinbase grow from its first hundred users to the first thousand? The company created financial incentives for users to share the product. Coinbase’s first few cohorts received a referral link to give friends 0.10 BTC for signing up. For each friend that verified an account, the referrer also... See more

Focus on finding “your people.” Instead of launching with a TechCrunch feature or a tweetstorm, Armstrong posted announcements on Tumblr (where Coinbase’s blog lived until 2016), Hacker News, and Reddit - places where his target customer spent a lot of time! Reddit was a particularly important acquisition source, as the early crypto community congr... See more

It was March 26, 2012. Brian Armstrong posted a self-described “hail mary” on the tech discussion forum Hacker News. YCombinator was interested in his startup, which Armstrong wrote “brings an emerging tech to the masses…and has a good shot at changing the world.” But he had a big problem - he didn’t want to go at it alone, and kept striking out on... See more

The team also recruited early users by going directly to their inboxes with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Garry Tan recalled a cold email he received in the early days of Coinbase (when the company was still called Bitbank) that had 0.05 BTC attached - he just had to create an account to claim it.