First, does the product have a network? Does it connect people with each other, whether for commerce, collaboration, communication, or something else at the core of the experience? And second, does the ability to attract new users, or to become stickier, or to monetize, become even stronger as its network grows larger?

One of the fundamental lessons of successful social networks is that they must first appeal to people when they have few users. Typically this is done through some form of single-user utility.

This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single

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A viral loop is very hard to execute, because your product or your content has to be extremely gripping. And people signing up need to feel like the product is going to be better if their friends are on it with them, yet there are just very few scenarios where that's actually true,” he says. “Pinterest tried to make that happen at first, but as... See more