Be your own first twenty users

One of the things I obsess over, and I want you to steal this habit, is pretending I am each of the first twenty users. Not imagining them. Becoming them, one at a time. I open my own platform and I ask, with total honesty: I am user number one. Now what?

Who is going to be my friend when I am the very first person here? What content do I engage with, when there is no content yet?

This is not a fun exercise. It is brutal, because it exposes every assumption you made while building for an imaginary crowd that already exists. When you are genuinely user number one, the platform has to give you a reason to stay before there is anybody else in the building. If it cannot, you have not built a social product. You have built an empty house with very good plumbing.

What Tinder understood about the cold start problem

This is the famous cold-start problem, and it haunts every online platform ever made. A social network is only valuable when it is full, but it starts empty, and nobody wants to be early to an empty party. So how do you get the first crowd before you have a crowd to attract them?

The smartest example I ever read about was Tinder. The story goes that before they chased men with advertising, they first went and got women to sign up in bulk, recruiting them through sororities. So by the time the ads hit men and the men poured in, there were already over a thousand women to swipe through. The men could not believe their luck, and they could not help but tell their friends to come and swipe too. One side of the market was seeded deliberately and quietly, so the other side would arrive to something that already felt alive.

The lesson is not "copy Tinder." The lesson is that somebody has to fill the room before the room can fill itself, and that is your job, by hand, on purpose.

My version of the problem was worse

Now here is where I had to be honest about my own nightmare. HVNG had a cold-start problem with an extra, vicious twist.

On Tinder, the user just has to sign up and they appear. On HVNG, a user did not only have to sign up. To actually show up on the discovery feed, they had to put up a hang — an invitation to do something. And the process of creating one of those hangs ran across four pages of forms.

Sit with that. Four pages of forms, demanded of a brand new user, on an empty platform, before anything interesting could possibly happen to them. None of this was working. I was effectively asking strangers to do a pile of admin to populate a room that, from their point of view, was still empty. It was a beautiful machine for producing nobody.

How to reduce friction and prime the pump at the same time

So I went to war on the friction, and I attacked it from two directions at once.

First, I primed the pump so the platform was never truly empty. I preloaded HVNG with locations people could actually hang in. Practically, this meant asking Claude to generate the list of the kinds of businesses and venues I needed, then pulling their real locations through an API so I could list them with proper location functionality baked in. Now a brand new user did not arrive to a void. They arrived to a map already full of real places to go.

Second, I took an axe to the four pages. I reduced the entire process of creating a hang down to two clicks. Two. Setting up a hang went from a chore you would abandon halfway to something so easy there was no longer any excuse not to do it.

And then I added one more thing that mattered more than I expected. I made sure you could send someone a direct hang invitation. This opened up person-to-person action on the platform that did not require the gating and the publicity of a public hang. Not everything has to be broadcast to a feed. Sometimes you just want to quietly ask one specific person, and giving people that private lane made the whole thing feel more human and a lot less like a stage you had to perform on.

Every form field is a tax on a stranger's curiosity. On an empty platform, that tax is the difference between a user and a ghost. Cut it to the bone, and never make people fill a room before you have filled it for them.

The missing glue: form, format, and swag

I was almost ready to launch after that. Almost. And then my design goat, Kiel, sent me a link.

The link itself was about curating ideas. But the moment I saw the display, the way the thing was presented on screen, I knew, instantly, that this was the missing glue. Not a feature. The glue. The thing that would make all the other pieces finally feel like one product instead of a competent collection of parts.

I have to explain why this hit me so hard, and it goes back to who I am. As a writer, I have always been obsessed with form and format — not just what a thing says, but the shape it arrives in. My graphic series 13 Moons has enjoyed over seventy thousand downloads, and a huge part of that is because it was illustrated by hand and committed fully to the picture-novel format on the web, at a moment when text had all but chased the last illustration off the internet. It stood out because it refused to look like everything else.

So I know, in my bones, the power of swag, and how much it actually means for market segmentation. And I asked myself the question that I think every founder should have tattooed somewhere visible:

Why would my product ever feel like its own thing, if by design it feels like something else?

If your social app looks and moves exactly like every other social app, you have pre-decided that you are a copy. The form is making the argument before the user reads a single word.

The spherical display: the moment a product becomes loved

So the moment I saw the image Kiel sent, I did not wait. I rushed to open my laptop and started prompting for a spherical display. A way of presenting discovery that was round, playful, alive, something you could turn and explore rather than just scroll past.

To this day, it remains my single favourite part of HVNG. And I love most of all that it lives on the discovery page, right where people land, so that users can actually reach out and play with it. It is not a static screen they consume. It is a thing they touch, and turning it is its own small pleasure.

That is the exact moment the platform crossed a line I had not even drawn yet. It stopped being a thing people would use and started being a thing people could love. The friction work, the two clicks, the preloaded venues, the direct invites — all of that got people in the door and was about being used. The spherical display, the form, the swag — that was about being loved. You need both. Accessibility gets them in. Distinctiveness makes them stay and brag about you.

Used and loved are two different achievements. The first is engineering. The second is identity. Do not stop at the first and assume you are finished.

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Hands-on lab

The chapter above is the why. These guides are the how. The one rule never changes: if a step stumps you, screenshot it and paste it to your AI with "assume I have no technical experience; tell me exactly what to click next." Nothing here cannot be undone.

G6.1 · Preload your platform with venues [Optional]

What you'll have: A platform that is not empty on day one.

Before you start: Beginner–Intermediate · ~2 hrs · free to low (API costs) · you'll need a location feature

1. Ask Claude to generate a list of the venue and business types you want.
2. Pull their real locations through a places or maps API and list them with map functionality.
3. Display them so new users arrive to a map already full of real places.

Check you did it right: New users see real venues immediately.

If something looks off: API costs or limits → cache results and start with your core city.

Unlocks: → the cold start is solved

G6.2 · Cut friction: reduce a multi-step flow to two clicks [Optional]

What you'll have: A core action so easy nobody abandons it.

Before you start: Beginner · 1–2 hrs · free · you'll need the flow (for example, creating a hang)

1. Map the current steps and count the taps.
2. Ask Claude to collapse it to the essentials, aiming for about two clicks: pre-fill, use defaults, remove optional fields.
3. Test how fast a brand-new user can complete it.

Check you did it right: The action takes roughly two clicks.

If something looks off: Lost needed info → make it optional or post-creation, not a blocker.

Unlocks: → more participation

G6.3 · Add direct, person-to-person invitations [Optional]

What you'll have: A private way to invite one person, without public posting.

Before you start: Beginner–Intermediate · 1–2 hrs · free · you'll need users and an invite concept

1. Ask Claude to add a direct invite so a user can invite a specific person.
2. Keep it private: no public feed, no gating.
3. Notify the invitee.

Check you did it right: You can send and receive a private invite.

If something looks off: Abuse or spam → rate-limit invites and respect blocks.

Unlocks: → more human, less performative

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A beautiful platform that earns nothing is a hobby

So there it is. The room is primed, the friction is gone, the product finally feels unmistakably like itself, and people can come in and play. We are done, right? The journey is complete?

Not so fast.

Let me ask you the uncomfortable question I had to ask myself, standing there admiring my lovely spinning sphere. Is your app not supposed to make any money? Or are you running a charity? Because a platform that is safe and comfortable and useful and beautiful and beloved, and that earns absolutely nothing, has a name, and that name is "expensive hobby." We have been here before, and I refuse to go back.

Before you go, the usual, and I will never tire of saying it. Notice that tonight's two breakthroughs both came from outside my own head. The cold-start strategy came from studying what others had done. The glue — the design that defines the entire product — came from a link a friend sent me. Left entirely alone, I would have launched an empty room with four pages of forms and called it brave.

That is why I keep begging you. Do not build alone. Africa does not win this as ten thousand isolated founders each rediscovering the cold-start problem in private and quietly burning out. We move as an ecosystem. We share hosting, we share tokens, we share the link that turns out to be the missing glue.

What's next

You have a platform people can love now. Next time, we make sure it can also feed you: how a social product actually sustains itself, and how you build monetisation in without strangling the very thing that made people love it.