Tinder isn't a site, it's an app. They got their early users by visiting college campuses and showing kids how easily it can get them laid. The full story is a great read: https://medium.com/message/how-tinder-co-founder-whitney-wol...

Hey that's a great idea.

My App isn't likely to help anyone score, but it would make good demo for computer science students.

I'm not too sure but flappy bird the game only got successful overnight because someone hated how crap it was and posted it onto Buzzfeed. Then it went viral.

TouchArcade was the first mainstream venue to report on it.

Then, eventually, PewDiePie, the #1 Youtube star by views, took it to to the exosphere.

http://www.appfreak.net/deconstructing-incredible-success-fl...

I have a whole bunch of content on just one site that I want to promote, but I don't want to spam. I've posted a few of the links here at HN, but I don't want to wear out my welcome.

Sometimes I can find good places to post my links by using web search, but it's quite a lot of time and effort. There's no real way to know ahead of time how many clicks I'll get, or whether I'll get any backlinks. I've had lots of clicks from comments posted to what I thought were really obscure, low-traffic sites, I expect because the people who frequent those sites, like to click links more than, say, Reddit or Facebook users.

There are also places like reddit that has a subreddit for basically everything.

"After I sent out that first email, I went rollerblading around a big office park where Tellme was based. I went up to a random guy and said, “Hey man, have you checked out hotornot.com yet?” He said, “No, what’s that?” I said, “Dude, just go check it out!” Then I went home and watched our logs for Tellme and saw a hit come in 10 minutes later, and then more hits kept coming from different people within Tellme.”

-James Hong, cofounder, HOTorNOT

From "Founders at Work"