Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @05:48AM (#30344910)

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.

Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by ako on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:39AM (#30345240)

That 1GB storage comes at a cost, which is basically a marketing cost. You give something away for free, in the hope it will generate word-of-mouth marketing. That free thing you're giving away is coming out of your marketing budget.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by ChrisRR on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:18AM (#30345112)

Gmail didn't just offer 1GB, it also offered the ability to search through emails which I don't think any free service allowed you to at the time

In 2004 that was pretty amazing

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by marcosdumay on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:45AM (#30346285)

Yahoo had search. The Gmail one worked a bit better, mostly because you could automatically tag things, but it was not unheard of.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by xtracto on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @10:18AM (#30347535)

Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by eezing on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @10:27AM (#30347694)

The killer feature was archive.

Growth was viral. Only cool people had Gmail.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by Lendal on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @07:07AM (#30345398)

Playing the lottery works too. Evidence: I see lottery winners. Therefore it must be a good business plan.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by sfifs on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:41AM (#30345251)

I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were

1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.

2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by wlesieutre on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:34AM (#30346924)

> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition

Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.

We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by hluska on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:40AM (#30346233)

I was quite young and things seemed shinier when I was young, so take this with a grain of salt. But I remember google differently. Gmail invites were a big deal, even amongst less technical people. Adding that sense of exclusivity to something they would use to advertise to us was remarkably smart.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by sanedigital on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:48AM (#30347116)

Like another poster said, Hotmail offered free email accounts. Google offered 1GB of storage. Both of those things are "marketing".

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by snowwrestler on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:27AM (#30346831)

In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.

Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.

Today, they work quite hard at all three.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by altdataseller on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:28AM (#30346093)

Hotmail did a fair amount of commercials https://youtu.be/IQRZcfAwn0g

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by hk__2 on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:07AM (#30346570)

Also if I remember correctly every email sent from an Hotmail address had something like "this email was sent with Hotmail" at the bottom.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by kevinmchugh on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:21AM (#30346745)

Also email services advertise themselves in the email address!

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by amelius on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @05:47AM (#30344905)

Wasn't there a waiting list for Hotmail/Gmail in the beginning?

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by ChrisRR on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:17AM (#30345104)

Gmail users initially had to be invited by existing gmail users.

That in itself is marketing.

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