The Start:

Alexis Ohanian, who dropped out of LSAT prep to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, co-founded Reddit with his college roommate, Steve Huffman.

Before starting Reddit, Alexis and Steve were students at the University of Virginia, where they bonded over their shared interest in technology and entrepreneurship.

The duo initially had plans for a different startup, but after a chance encounter with Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, they pivoted to create Reddit, an online community platform.

The Problem:

Alexis and Steve recognized that there was a lack of centralized, user-driven platforms where people could share content and engage in discussions on a wide array of topics.

Existing forums were often fragmented and limited in scope.

With Reddit, they aimed to build a simple, user-friendly platform that allowed users to post content, vote on submissions, and participate in discussions across diverse communities or "subreddits."

The goal was to create a space where people could freely share knowledge, insights, and entertainment, fostering a vibrant online community.

Getting their first customers:

In 2005, Steve & Alexis moved to Cambridge after their graduation.

Their preliminary vision for Reddit was simple - A community-led news website, with the popularity of the content decided by anonymous user upvotes & downvotes.

They were two weeks into building Reddit when Paul sent them an email asking why they hadn’t launched yet.

A week later, Steve wrote back that the Reddit web app was up and running. On June 23, 2005, Reddit was live. The founders built the prototype and launched it within 20 days.

A few days later, Paul published his next essay where he explained his hypothesis that it cost less to start a startup than most thought. In this essay, he cited Reddit as an example. That got Reddit its first 1000 visitors.

At the start, Alexis and Steve were the top posters themselves. They built fake accounts to give users the impression the site was bigger than it was. By August, they no longer had to do that because the site was growing on its own.

There were no subreddits and no commenting. But they did have Karma points (Reddit’s gamification mechanism where users got points for submitting content) from the very beginning.

They began to get regular traffic from a tech oriented crowd especially early male adopters.

Many influential bloggers and programmers began using the site to share interesting links and discuss topics related to technology and startups. This helped to establish Reddit as a hub for tech-related news and discussion.

A few months later, Aaron Swartz joined the Reddit team. A programmer by trade, Aaron helped the team ship more features, one of which was the comment feature.

In October 2006, the subreddits feature was released, which turned out to be a gamechanger. r/science and r/programming became particularly popular. So did r/nsfw.

In just 16 months, Reddit reached 1 million monthly active users (MAU) and 70,000 daily readers (DAU).

In 2006, just weeks after the launch of Subreddits, Reddit got sold to Conde Nast for $10 million. Condé Nast is a media company that owns a number of popular magazines, including Wired and The New Yorker.

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