The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

In the workplace, an example might be an office worker that uses Google Docs to author a memo. Sharing the document as a link is easy, and coworkers will then add comments, suggest changes, and make edits themselves—these are the network features.

Within each, it can be useful to track the percentage of consumers that are seeing zeroes. If it’s too high a number, that category of users is experiencing anti-network effects, and it will never break through.

They definitely do, but it’s a combination of big virality projects, lots of little optimizations, and strong retention that ultimately drives big viral factor numbers.

These companies pioneered a new style of “bottom-up” growth, where individual contributors seeded a product’s adoption within a customer company.

One notable example of this is the ever present “People You May Know” or “Friend suggestions” feature. Every social platform at scale has some kind of implementation of it for a reason: it works incredibly well.

With the former, a networked product must be designed to switch users from single player to multiplayer mode. With the latter, the product must switch from manual (and company-supported) to automated.

The Escape Velocity stage is all about working furiously to strengthen network effects and to sustain growth.

also ask, who are the first, most important users to get onto a nascent network, and why? And how do you seed the initial network so that it grows in the way you want?

Zoom’s simplicity is a strength when it comes to the company’s ability to grow its network. When the product concept and value is simple to describe, it makes them easier to spread from user to user, much like the “meme” coined by noted biologist Richard Dawkins in one of my favorite books, The Selfish Gene. You can copy and paste a Zoom link—it’s

When we combine disruption theory with network effects, it makes even more sense—atomic networks often start at the low end in terms of functionality, in a niche market. But once an atomic network is established, the hard side of the network is willing to extend their offerings and services to go into the next vertical.