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

The concept of atomic networks is powerful because if you can build one, you can probably build two. Each one often becomes easier, because each network can be intertwined with the next—Slack’s success within one company can help it become successful in another, as employees move about and introduce the product to new workplaces.

When a new product carefully curates a network, followed by implementing invites so that it can copy and paste similar networks, then it can grow to take over the market.