How Gamma Acquired 10 Million Users in 9 Months

Below, co-founders Dylan Diamond and Max Baron share their biggest lessons on building a viral social consumer app, including:

1. Embracing single-player mode as a wedge for social products


2. Building a product that users feel was built just for them


3. Why it’s OK to be unscalable—you can make it scale later


4. Building a familiar product is much easier if you’r

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- Get the product right then focus on growth - get your team to think in terms of fact and hypothesis. " - Growth isn’t just spending money it’s figuring out how to create a flywheel that will generate word of mouth marketing. - Get your shortlist about your first users and learn everything about them and begin to market.

I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more

A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with ‘growth hacking’. That sort of works—at least, it will fool investors for awhile until they start digging into retention numbers—but eventually the music stops.

One result of this past tech cycle was a view that companies needed to build hyper complex ponzi schemes of ambition in order to accumulate capital and be valued. This led to a variety of shooting stars that never realized their main goal.

Another view was an insane amount of value ascribed to hyper-narrow features masquerading as companies, leading... See more

The best models are ones that don't really rely much on paid acquisition. The best entrepreneurs have figured out hacks to get user demand at scale through a user proposition