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David Baszucki explains the virality hack he used to acquire Roblox’s first 100,000 users

June 16, 2025

“We were live with about 100 people hitting the site every day — very early friends and family. Then someone told about this really neat hack: you can just go buy 100 users from Google at $1 per user.”

Spending just $100 per day over the following 1-2 years provided the early Roblox team with a stream of new users that they could use to find product/market fit and facilitate word-of-mouth growth.

“We didn’t spend too much,” the Roblox co-founder says, “But that initial traffic was enough to get the machinery going and kick into virality.”

It’s worth emphasizing that Roblox didn’t pay to acquire their millions of users. The paid acquisition was solely used to figure out what they needed to build to grow via word-of-mouth.

DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg recommends a similar strategy and urges founders to initially think of their product as a “leaky bucket”:

“You can think of your initial investment in [new users] as pouring water into a leaky bucket. At first your bucket will be very leaky because your product is not yet a full solution to customer needs and problems. In other words, your product is not as sticky as it could be, and many customers will not want to engage with it yet. As a consequence, much of the money you are spending on traction will leak out of your bucket. This is exactly where most founders go wrong. They think because this money is leaking out that it is money wasted. Oppositely, this process is telling you where the real leaks are in your bucket (product). If you don’t interact with cold customers in this way, then you generally spend time on the wrong things in terms of product development.”