It is likley social marketing and other startups on the below list have helped Codecademy, an annual service that sends weekly how-to-write-code tutorials, to have one of the fastest starts for a startup — 100,000 members in two days.
The Buisness Insider has ranked the top 15 startups and the time it took them to reach one million users:
Relaunched Path – 2 weeks
Oink app – 3 weeks
Instagram – 2.5 months
Spotify- 5 months
Fab – 5 months
Dropbox – 7 months
Facebook – 10 months
Foursquare – 13 months
Pinterest – 20 months
Gilt Groupe – 24 months
Twitter – 24 months
Tumblr – 24 months
One Kings Lane (home decor) – 26 months
Airbnb – 30 months (estimated)
Kickstarter – 30 months
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures who has an investment in Codecademy, blogged about why he thought the Codecademy campaign worked so well per PSFK:
1) an awesome idea. “give me your email address, we’ll send you interactive coding lessons weekly” is a damn good idea.
2) well timed – launching as a “new year’s resolution” is genius. but also launching in a “dead news period” was equally genius. jan 1st and jan 2nd of this year were slow news days.
3) the landing page is clean, simple, and well designed. the call to action is simple. here’s a blog post from the designer explaining how that page was designed.
4) the use of twitter and facebook to spread the word is simple and powerful. after you give your email address, you are given the option of tweeting out or posting to your wall.
5) a small ask. they didn’t ask for money, the service is free. they simply asked for an email address, something everyone has and most are willing to share in return for real value.
If you are on the hunt for new startups you might want to keep an eye out for pitches posted on The Board at HEDGEAnswers.com and check out what is already trending as bland and hot for 2012.