🎯 Behance’s first 100 users

A counterintuitive solve for the chicken-and-egg problem

December 17, 2024

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Read time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

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Behance’s first 100 users

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Tell me you’ve never faced a chicken-and-egg problem like this:

  • Users won't join your platform without great content
    → Content creators won't invest effort to join without users already consuming content

  • Users won’t search your marketplace with no businesses
    → Businesses won’t invest effort to join without users already searching for businesses

  • Users won't download your social app without their friends

    → Friends won't invest effort to join without their own friends already there

Behance, now a 40-million-member creative network acquired into the Adobe ecosystem, came up with an elegant solution to this timeless dilemma:
→ Eliminate the perceived ‘effort investment’ by onboarding the first 100 ideal users manually.

"Nobody really wanted to set things up themselves on a platform without any traffic, so we did a lot of it ourselves.” — Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance

By providing a white-glove service for their early ICP, they created a foundation of high-quality portfolios that shaped the future of the platform.

💡

Strategy Playbook: Establish the initial network by spoon-feeding an early cohort of ideal users.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  Bootstrap the initial content

Rather than prematurely developing an organic growth lever for the network, the Behance team carefully engineered a perfect initial state:

  • Hand-picking only the creatives who’s work they admired the most

  • Developing portfolios that properly showcased the platform’s features

  • Populating each portfolio with multiple impressive projects (avg 5-10 per portfolio)

  • Writing blog posts about how top creatives were getting value from the platform

By doing “things that don’t scale”, Behance rapidly became a network that appeared full of great work.

This had multiple benefits:

  • Inspiration for future users

  • Establishing a high quality-bar

  • Learning what ideal users wanted

  • Creating social proof for organic growth

By late 2007, the strategy was working: Dozens of new projects were being posted daily by complete strangers.

2. Self-perpetuating quality engine

When new visitors landed on Behance, they only saw exceptional projects. No ghost town. No mediocre work. Just a carefully curated gallery of the highest caliber creative output.

This wasn't just content moderation - it was strategic positioning. By hand-picking exceptional projects to showcase, Behance created an aspirational environment that set the tone for the future of the platform:

  • What "great" looked like

  • How the community would behave

  • Which creatives would be attracted to join

By optimising for their perfect users early on, Behance created a space where elite creators naturally wanted to congregate.

This triggered a powerful flywheel: building features to showcase exceptional work attracted exceptional creators, who in turn produced more exceptional work to showcase on the platform.

Behance understood that achieving quality-at-scale meant avoiding flooding the platform with low-quality content early on.

Intense curation and establishing a clear standard meant every new visitor immediately understood: this is where the world's best creative talent (and creative work) lives.

3. Staggered customer acquisition

Behance developed a methodical approach to growing beyond their initial ‘ideal user’ base:

“Contrary to logic, you don’t want all of your customers right away.” — Scott Belsky

Stage 1: The Willing

  • Target: Early adopters ready to experiment

  • Approach: Personal outreach to admired creators

  • Goal: Build perfect example portfolios

Stage 2: The Forgiving

  • Target: Users who understand beta products

  • Approach: Invitation-only access

  • Goal: Maintain quality while expanding

Stage 3: The Viral

  • Target: Influencers who can spread the word

  • Approach: Open access (but still curated)

  • Goal: Accelerate growth without sacrificing standards

Stage 4: The Valuable

  • Target: Users with high lifetime-value

  • Approach: Laser-focus on engagement and retention metrics

  • Goal: Maximise revenue per user

Stage 5: The Profitable

  • Target: Enterprise customers and power-users who justify high costs

  • Approach: Premium features and pricing tiers

  • Goal: Optimise profit margins, even at the expense of total user count

The lesson in all this: focus on excellence before scale to build something that eventually achieves both.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

[3 minute watch]

Today’s treasure for the internet archaeologists reading.

276 views, 240p quality, published 13 years ago.

A foreshadow of Behance’s strategic positioning, philosophy for curation, and advice for online creatives.

[1 minute read]

An early Behance blog post (or even manifesto) on one of the company’s defining practices: ‘Launching in beta’.

“You may be uncertain – and some things may remain unfinished – but you’ve got to push it out. The reasons are both practical and psychological.”

[7 minute read]

Deep dive interview on Behance’s role in Adobe's high-stakes transition from boxed software to cloud subscriptions:

  • How Adobe convinced Wall Street to accept short-term pain

  • The internal debates around pricing and packaging

  • Why community became critical for subscription retention

That’s all for today’s breakdown - hope you enjoyed!

— Tom

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