I don't want to go into details, but I'll say what we didn't do. We didn't spam and we didn't do anything that we wouldn't want done to ourselves. We just got creative with advertising.
I agree with zkinion, many startups use "legal spam". Our site was around before MySpace became the social networking behemoth that it is today. They used to make fake accounts on our site all the time. And we would do it back to them.
You don't read about it much in the stories in Founders at Work, but from what I've seen a lot of very successful sites did whatever they had to do to win. If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it. But there are a lot of social sites out there, and a lot of them play dirty.
"If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it" - this is a the exception - in almost all case you have to so a lot to get the word out - it does not have to be traditional advertising but reaching your audience requires continues effort.
careful with 'do anything' - in certain cases if found out it will badly burn you and your organisation - e.g. Holden Karnofsky getting badly burnt after astroturfing MetaFilter over Xmas and the fallout that GiveWell then had to deal with. That won't apply to a lot of HN readers and their startups, but be careful - if trust is going to be a big part of your identity, don't be evil (there are always digital traces to come bite you in the ass)
I agree with zkinion, many startups use "legal spam". Our site was around before MySpace became the social networking behemoth that it is today. They used to make fake accounts on our site all the time. And we would do it back to them.
You don't read about it much in the stories in Founders at Work, but from what I've seen a lot of very successful sites did whatever they had to do to win. If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it. But there are a lot of social sites out there, and a lot of them play dirty.