In this community, participants discuss their work in their respective companies and chat about various topics. Seems like nothing special 😉 However, for example, half of the employees from Google and Microsoft are registered in it! All thanks to a simple focus that the founders applied to recruit the first users. The beauty of it is that startups from almost any field can use the same approach.
Project Essence
Blind is a community where people discuss their own and others’ companies, exploring how things work in different workplaces. Additionally, they engage in discussions on any other topics of interest.
The main feature of Blind is that all community participants remain anonymous. Upon registration, they must provide a pseudonym under which their posts and comments will be published. At the same time, alongside the pseudonym, the participant’s current company affiliation is always indicated.
To achieve this, participants need to provide their work email address within the employer’s domain during registration to receive a verification link confirming their affiliation with that company. If a community member switches to another company, they must go through the verification process with the new email address.
If the employer company is not verified, the participant can only read other posts and comments but cannot contribute with their own.
Verified community members can see three types of groups:
- Closed groups, accessible for reading and publishing only to employees of the same company. The ability to create such groups arises when more than 30 employees from the same company register on the site.
- Closed groups, accessible for reading and publishing only to employees of affiliated companies, such as those belonging to the same holding.
- Open groups for all community participants.
Participant anonymity is always preserved, even if they write in a closed group of their company or holding.
In addition to group communication, community members can send each other private messages within the community’s internal messenger. However, this does not remove anonymity unless one participant discloses their real name in the conversation.
The number of private messages a community member can send per month is limited. However, participants can purchase additional message quotas using the community’s internal currency, “B Money.” This currency can also be used to buy other premium service features.
Each month, participants receive a certain amount of free currency. Additional currency must be purchased with real money.
Currently, Blind has 9 million verified participants. I first noticed this project in the spring of 2021 when they had only 4.1 million participants.
Blind has recently raised $9.69 million in new investments, bringing its total funding to $71.5 million, including the current round.
What’s interesting
Blind itself originates from South Korea, but it has become highly popular among employees of American technology companies. For instance, it has 135 thousand Microsoft employees verified (60% of the company’s workforce), 80 thousand Google employees (43% of the workforce), and 70 thousand Meta employees (over 90% of the company’s workforce).
Moreover, Blind participants are true professionals. Four out of five community members are over 25 years old, and the median professional experience of a participant is 8 years.
The community’s popularity is so immense that Time magazine included Blind in the list of the 100 most influential companies of 2023.
The first interesting point is that the startup’s idea didn’t come out of nowhere. A similar anonymous community was launched by employees of a large South Korean technology company. It gained popularity among its employees, but the company forced the closure of the community after discussions turned to the negative aspects of working there. That’s when the founders decided to create a similar platform for the same purposes but external to any specific company, ensuring the company couldn’t intervene.
This once again confirms the idea that good startup ideas are found, not invented 😉
The second interesting point is how Blind’s founders made their community popular among American technology companies. The startup was launched in Korea in 2013. After two years, the founders decided to enter the American market and relocated to Silicon Valley. However, all their attempts to attract a sufficient number of American participants through advertising failed.
So, they decided to move to Seattle, where Amazon’s headquarters were located, to better understand the needs of employees in a large American technology company. They personally acquainted themselves with Amazon employees in cafes near the headquarters, showcased their service, and convinced them to register on the spot. In addition, they started organizing parties for Amazon employees, where they conducted the same demonstrations and registrations.
After six months of this hands-on approach, things finally took off. Many Amazon employees first joined the community, discussing work-related matters and issues. Following them, employees from other technology companies started joining, learning about Blind from acquaintances at Amazon.
This “manual” approach to recruiting the first users completely aligns with Paul Graham’s well-known advice, “Do things that don’t scale,” referring precisely to the initial stages of a startup’s development.
Recently, on the Dark Side, I wrote about another example of a “non-scalable” startup takeoff, Udemy, representing an online course marketplace. It happened thanks to the same advice from Paul Graham — though this was before Paul wrote an essay on the topic. Here’s the story, told from the perspective of Udemy’s co-founder.
- At one gathering, I found myself next to the co-founder of Airbnb and asked him, “How did you manage to start growing at all?”. Because none of our promotion channels worked — neither social media advertising, nor search engine optimization, nor attempts to launch viral videos on YouTube.
- He said that Paul Graham gave them advice to “do non-scalable things.” So they focused on making owners of houses listed on Airbnb start earning. Although the actions for this were entirely non-scalable — for example, visiting each house to take beautiful photos and adding them to the website.
- At that moment, it struck me like lightning that scalable channels don’t work when you don’t have scale yourself!
- So, we also focused on making Udemy instructors start earning. We started doing non-scalable things — editing videos of their lessons, rewriting course descriptions, and creating promo videos. We even started paying for advertising their courses. Luckily, there were few instructors, so we managed to handle everything.
- And it worked! Initially, new instructors came because we provided assistance. Then they started competing with each other, learned to create good lessons and persuasive course descriptions themselves. And then, as the number of instructors increased, the promotion channels that didn’t work before suddenly started working.
- But all that was needed for Udemy to start taking off was to, by any non-scalable means, ensure that our instructors earned $3,000 each.
Now Udemy is a public company with a value of $2.3 billion.
Where to Go
It might be a bit challenging to oust Blind from American technology companies 😉
However, what’s stopping you from implementing the same model and pulling off a similar non-scalable start with companies from a different industry and/or in another region? That’s the first possible direction.
The second option is to think about how the same “do things that don’t scale” approach can be used to gain initial momentum in your startup, even if it’s in a different field.
How can you manually recruit the first users? How can these people achieve their goals with your service? How can you help them with that? What can you start doing manually for this?
About the Company
- Blind
- Website: teamblind.com
- Latest Funding Round: $9.69M, 26.12.2023
- Total Investments: $71.5M, Rounds: 8