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- Unheard Roots of Reddit 🧑💻
Unheard Roots of Reddit
Reddit is a company most of us have used or heard of at least once in our lifetimes.
The 10+ billion dollar company was built by two young college kids.
Here is their Unheard Roots 🙌
The college days 🎓
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the founders of Reddit, both studied computer science at the University of Virginia.
Their dorms were across from each other which led to them becoming good friends.
One of the things they bonded over was their shared desire to potentially pursue entrepreneurship after college.
During their senior years, they decided they wanted to start a company together.
The first startup 📱
The first idea the duo had was an app called Mind Bubble Menu that would allow people to order food from their cell phones.
“I had a lot of ideas at the time. Just like I do now. Little frustrations in life where you think you can do better and make this better. One of the ideas I had was for ordering food from your cell phone.”
On spring of the duos senior year in college, March 2005, Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, was scheduled to give a talk at Harvard about building startups.
Steve Huffman, one of the Reddit co-founders, thought it would be cool to meet him and pitch Paul their new app idea.
Meeting Paul Graham 🤝
During the event, Steve had one of the books of Paul Graham on coding using Lisp and wanted Paul to sign the book.
Alexis, the other founder, got Paul Grahams attention and started chatting him up at the event to help Steve get his book signed.
Right after getting the book signed, Alexis decided to ask Paul Graham if they could buy him a coffee to get his feedback on their startup idea.
“And then I said Dr.Graham it would totally be worth the cost of buying you a drink to get your opinion on our startup. We have come all the way from Virginia.”
Validation & Despair 🧑💻😥
Alexis and Steve ended up meeting with Paul Graham at a cafe and pitching him their startup idea.
“Paul sits down and says let me hear your pitch. So I just pitched him and he interrupted before I could get too far into it and was like this is awesome.”
Soon after the pitch, Paul announces a new project called Y-Combinator and invites the duo to apply to the program.
The idea behind Y-Combinator is startups apply and if their ideas are good enough they get in to get funding and mentorship from Paul Grahams team.
Even tough Alexis and Steve were invited to apply, they were rejected after pitching the program directors.
Despite their idea being great, the timing was off. This was the early 2000s and the iPhone wasn’t even out yet. Therefore it would have been incredibly difficult building that sophisticated of an app.
While on the train back to Virginia, Alexis received a phone call from Paul Graham about their YC application, Paul said the team liked both of the entrepreneurs but hated the idea.
Paul Graham went onto suggest the duo apply with another idea that can work with the existing technologies.
Reddit is born ✨
The one rule Paul Graham gave the two was to not build something on mobile phones.
“And he just said listen don’t do mobile phones. At the time there was no app store, you would have to go through carriers.” - Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit
The two entrepreneurs come up with the idea for Reddit in summer of 2005 and began working on it. The idea was to build the front page of the internet.
There was an increasing amount of content being created on the internet and no central place where users could find and access all of the content.
Growing Reddit 🧑💻
What makes building any form of social media difficult is getting early users to generate content that can attract more users.
In order to work around the problem, Alexis and Steve created fake accounts and made fake posts to make it seem like people were using the website.
At some point, Reddit was put on the radar of other internet users and Reddit co-founders started to notice real accounts making real posts.
“The day I woke up and Reddit was working on its own was just the most incredible feeling. It was like holy shit we’ve got this thing that is making a difference in peoples lives.” - Steve Huffman, Co-Founder of Reddit
As users started to create and engage the founders started adding new features like subreddits, tags, flairs, etc and the rest, as they say, is history ✨
Lessons from the Reddit story 📚
There are a couple of remarkably important lessons in the Reddit story.
Timing matters
Whatever you create if you don’t get the timing, it won’t work. The duo came up with the idea of mobile food delivery in 2005, 2 years before the iPhone and app store.
If they had come up with the same idea in 2013, they could have been the ones to build Doordash.
Find mentors that can help you
We didn’t go into detail about Paul Grahams involvement in Reddit but he had a tremendous role to play in getting the company to where it is today.
Steve Huffman at some point said building Reddit felt like homework due to just how much Paul Graham was micro managing the young founders.
Be perspicacious
Being observant is perhaps one of the rare uniting trait of all successful founders.
Paying attention to things going on at the time led to the Alexis and Steve building Reddit.