How Medium Got Their First 1000 Users

Fact: Barack Obama was one of the early supporters!

Derick David
5 min readNov 19, 2021

In the past months, I’ve seen articles about how Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Substack got their first 1000 users, but not Medium.

So this motivated me to do my research and write about this amazing writing and blogging platform and how Ev Williams and Biz Stone got their first 1000 users.

Without further ado, let’s get it started.

The story

Ev Williams created Medium in 2012 with the idea of a publishing space where users can create posts longer than the 140-character limit of Twitter. By the way, Ev Williams is also the co-founder of Twitter along with Jack Dorsey!

In addition, Ev Williams also has ambition. To fix the broken world of journalism and bias content. To think that this was in the early 2010s was visionary, especially because it’s only until 2015–2016 that the world has seen how journalism is broken.

Ev Williams doesn’t want Medium to be just another blogging platform. He wanted to spice it up differently by focusing on the community. This is another reason why it’s visionary, given how startups nowadays are being founded on the idea of community-driven.

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Derick David

1M+ views. Seen at Forbes. 10x Top Writer in Technology, Innovation, and Design. https://twitter.com/jeazous