The Cold Start Problem: Using Network Effects to Scale Your Product

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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So if we want to understand why network effects often fail to lead to marketplace monopolies, we should start by considering the Thumbtacks against the Taskrabbits, the Tinders against the Bumbles, and the Upworks against the Fiverrs, all in relentless competition against mirror-image services. These services all have network effects in the traditi... See more