From idea to half the Fortune 500
These companies pioneered a new style of “bottom-up” growth, where individual contributors seeded a product’s adoption within a customer company.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
...is what approach you use to *acquire customers at scale.*
Meaning, what's your *distribution* insight?
Not just your product insight.
Because if you build something good, often they will not simply come.
Dropbox, in the years before its IPO, came to orient itself in a new direction—to focus on highest-value users in the highest-value networks interacting with the highest-value files.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
Take companies through the entire journey, from incorporation to going public.
Packy McCormick • Stripe: The Internet's Most Undervalued Company
In the early days (read: years) of Gumroad, we scoured the web for people who could benefit from a product like Gumroad and then told them about it. Literally thousands of times. That’s the only way, really, when you’re young and no one cares or knows who you are, to get folks to use your product.
Sahil Lavingia • The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less
As all this was going on, this new approach to market growth and customer acquisition—one that discarded the old model of big marketing budgets and unscientific, unmeasurable tactics in favor of more cost-effective, consistent, and data-driven ones—was spreading across Silicon