Jason Citron

“We started working on it January 2015 and within I'd say two months some of our friends were very excited about it, but we didn't really have any users.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example, but I'd say within three or four months we had like 20 DAU that weren't us.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“People would say, 'this is the dumbest idea ever' — even people who played games thought, why would I want this? I already have whatever app I'm using.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app as opposed to saying like 'try this thing out'; we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit on Reddit where there was a new expansion coming out and got a friend to make a post asking what people thought.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We posted a link to a Discord server, people clicked it, tried the product, told others on the subreddit — we got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We kind of did this playbook a little bit for like six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We started working on it January 2015 and within I'd say two months some of our friends were very excited about it but we didn't really have any users but it was pretty clear they wanted to use it.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We re... we rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example, but I'd say within three or four months we had like 20 DAU that weren't us.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“People would would say, this is the dumbest idea ever. Like, no one's going to use this.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app as opposed to saying like try this thing out like we're selling it to you.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“What we actually did is we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit on Reddit where there was a new expansion coming out for this game and we got one of our friends to make a post basically saying, 'Hey, I'm trying out this new voiceover IP app. What do y'all think about it?'”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We went into that thread on Reddit and posted a link to a Discord server ... people clicked on that link, went into the server and then they were talking to us and trying it out and they went back to the subreddit and were like, 'Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs.'”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“We got 50 users that day from that post and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day and it sort of started to snowball and then we kind of did this playbook a little bit for like six months and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.”

— From Jason Citron on the growth hack that got Discord its first few thousand users, Startup Archive (December 04, 2025)

“The lived reality of going through a pivot is that you've just spent some amount of time pouring your heart into building some product and it's not working, which is very hard emotionally. But you can learn a lot from failure and think about what to do next.”

— From The Untold Story of Discord: "Pivots and F*ck Ups...", a16z speedrun (April 28, 2025)

“When we built the game and launched it in 2014 called Fates Forever, it was a competitive multiplayer game on iPad, but for a variety of reasons it didn't work. That made us realize people were organizing around our game and cobbling together communication apps, which led us to pivot to a chat app for gaming—Discord.”

— From The Untold Story of Discord: "Pivots and F*ck Ups...", a16z speedrun (April 28, 2025)