come for the network, stay for the tool

The key point to understand about Bloomberg is that it’s both a software product and a social network. The software product determined who would join the network, but the network is what keeps users there. It’s like a multiplayer video game, or Harvard: Sure, the quests and campus are useful, but people keep showing up because of the friends

The paid community concept is a reconfiguration of digital communities caused by the failure of big social networks to ensure deep vertical communities to thrive. It provides mainstream tools to niche communities. Maybe niche communities need niche products? One hypothesis could be that “bottom-up community-driven businesses” emerge when one

Don’t buy into the VC hype on this one. There will not be one tool to serve new internet-first communities.

Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.” But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social

Easy to find an idea

Transformational ideas for software—the ones that could become huge businesses and change the world—are rare and hard to spot. Even when they do work out, they often take tremendous effort and require an appetite for risk.

In contrast, incremental improvements to existing software are far easier to find . If you’re opinionated

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

“communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”