Zoom didn’t just acquire users with a great product—it had a superior monetization strategy that converted free users into paying customers at scale.

Unlike competitors like Join.me and Webex, which struggled to create a compelling reason to upgrade to their premium versions, Zoom’s freemium model created a clear, unavoidable upgrade path . By offer... See more

On the deflation side, social networks can get less cool as more people join. The canonical example here is what happened to Facebook when parents started joining: all the young people left for Instagram and Snapchat. Social networks need to be analyzed based on more than their network effects... There are three axes for analyses: Social Capital, U... See more

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