You can stand out by offering unique features for your biggest supporters and early adopters. Nothing creates a more powerful marketing initiative than rewarding your current top supporters. They’ll go out and sell for you like crazy when they are regularly acknowledged and rewarded for being part of the founding community.
This experience emboldened my observation that most product teams only spend the final mile of their experience building the product thinking about (and testing) the first mile of the customer’s experience using the product.
The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market. This is where Twitter is making its play.