How did PBworks (formerly PBwiki) get initial traction?

The site never had a "stealth" or "closed beta" period. I openly developed the engineering alpha and just launched it as-is. I emailed a number of friends of mine, including Xeni at BoingBoing, the LifeHacker folks, and Andy Baio (waxy.org) saying "Hey, look at this thing I whipped up in a weekend: let me know what you think." These sites posted links to PB without a lot of commentary (see http://ift.tt/2ieOnmd...) - largely because there wasn't much commentary they could give! The site itself was incredibly minimalist - just a picture of a peanut butter sandwich, a field for your email address, and a field for the name of the wiki you wanted to create (see http://ift.tt/2iePFha...). You basically had to already know what a wiki was - or at least be willing to sign up for one sight unseen. There really was just no explanation about how to use it or why you'd want one.

I was really shocked by how quickly people came in to try it out, really. Some 48 hours after launching we had over a thousand groups signed up and making edits. Pretty shortly thereafter I ditched the other projects I was working on contemporaneously (IM Smarter, BotBlock, Thwapp) to focus on PB. Word of mouth continued to spread, largely because there just weren't any other quick-to-sign-up private hosted wiki solutions out in June of 2005. I'll note that JotSpot and Wikispaces both also launched in 2005, so I think we really got incredibly lucky in terms of a launch window. If PB had launched in, say, November of 2005 I'm pretty sure we would not have seen the kind of adoption we did.

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from Quora http://ift.tt/2h9qW01