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Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network
While Hipstamatic built a great tool, it was Instagram that used network effects to win the market. The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to cal
... See moreAndrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
Come for the tool, stay for the network” is one of the most famous strategies for launching and scaling networks. Start with a great “tool”—a product experience that is useful even for one user as a utility. Then, over time, pivot the users into a series of use cases that tap into a “network”—the part where you collaborate, share, communicate, or o
... See moreAndrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: Using Network Effects to Scale Your Product
Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.” But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social netw
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