Perplexity’s first users didn’t come from a marketing campaign.

Perplexity’s first users didn’t come from a marketing campaign. According to an Economic Times report, some people found the AI search startup by typing their own social media handles into its search bar. The answers weren’t always accurate, but they were often surprising enough that people shared screenshots online.

The report says the team’s first experiment focused on Twitter’s (now X) social graph. Co-founders Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho collected tweets through academic API accounts and built a search experience that let people ask questions about the platform’s data. That first version covered only a portion of Twitter’s data, so some users couldn’t find their own accounts.