This is the classic social media chicken-and-egg cold start problem. Every Silicon Valley PM has likely heard the stories about how Twitter and Facebook's critical keystone metrics were similar: get a user to follow some minimum number of accounts. Achieve that and those users turn into WAUs, or even better, DAUs. Users failing to follow enough... See more

Building new networks is particularly challenging now because AI hasn't opened up "new land" like mobile did. To create a new network, it often means taking market share from existing ones.

Consumer network companies face a "three-body problem": they need the right target audience, the right network size, and the right value proposition to succeed.... See more

When Substack launched their reader web app last year, I thought it was interesting but faced an uphill battle. It’s really hard in today’s age of addiction to get people to habitually come to a new URL. That’s why blogs died and became reincarnated as newsletters.