Musical.ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community | #ProductSF

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

In all of these cases, the primary challenge with building a large consumer company is not “how will you make money,” but  “how do you get to be a long-standing durable network and define a new set of behaviors or verbs?”  Once you can do that, it’s very likely you will be able to monetize at significant scale.