Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn

It’s hard to compete with big social networks head-on these days. The network effects of those giant social networks are so strong, a straight-on challenge seems, well, challenging. But there is lots of opportunity to focus on one user niche or one specific form factor.

Another way to look at it is, catching lighting in bottle is so rare in successful communities, it's worthwhile to dissect what went right and what went wrong. Understanding that magic helps us truly understand people's motivations and allows us to build better products in the future.

It's hard to get around that, but the way you can do it is if you build in utility. And I think that is largely because advertising was a hell of a drug for these companies for so long. That is why all these big internet advertising platforms were slow to become marketplaces, because it would have a temporary negative financial impact. Th... See more

Clubhouse is an audio-only social network where people can listen in to live chats and discuss various topics, like tech or sports. Started in 2020, the company got millions of users and a billion-dollar valuation in less than a year. It looks like an overnight success, but Davison and Seth had launched various consumer social apps over the previou

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Common themes emerge when you look at Slack’s strong network launch as well as the successes across marketplaces, social networks, developer platforms, and dozens of other categories. Many of them are counterintuitive: The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value propos

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