The likes of Airbnb, Etsy and Uber have disrupted their respective industries through their far reaching business innovations. Yet even they once struggled to get their first set of a thousand customers. Only a multi pronged strategy worked to get this undergoing. Also the chicken-egg problem persisted as these companies were confused whether to first go all out marketing and get customers or to first get their house in order by having top class service. They chose the second option. And, they started thinking like a customer. This brought Airbnb to Craigslist’s list of property owners who were now targeted to advertise for lending their rooms for holidays. This gave them the database, but now the problem of aesthetics arose as most house owners clicked sub-par pictures good enough for the rental business but nor for tourism purpose. Thus professional photographers were now hired. The next challenge that arose was scaling up. Proper business research was done by team Uber to deduce that in which cities the existing cab services were not delivering adequate value. These cities were targeted and similar analysis was conducted by Airbnb and Etsy. These companies took advantages of situations and conditions fertile for such a new player to emerge. Eventually from the first thousand, they rose to a million users within a matter of a few years.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2016/07/13/how-uber-airbnb-and-etsy-attracted-their-first-1000-customers/#656040732851