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Growth = Engagement: A product design principle you can’t ignore
Newly launched startups love to see their traffic and sign-up stats grow. Growth, after all, is opium for a startup fresh out of the door, and frequent refreshes of the sign-up logs are the happiest...
View ArticleA Platform Thinking Approach to Building a Business
Every business is an engine. It needs to do a certain set of things repeatedly to create value. If you haven’t figured out that set of repeated operations, you probably haven’t created a scalable...
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The network effect playbook: Social products win with utility, not invites
The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction....
View ArticleUsers or Customers?
If you’ve been around the internet startup world for long enough, you’ve probably engaged in the user-customer debate at least once. Who’s the user? Who’s the customer? Who should we be focusing on?...
View ArticleWhy Business Models Fail: Pipes Vs. Platforms
Why do most social networks never take off? Why are marketplaces such difficult businesses? Why do startups with the best technology fail so often? There are two broad business models: pipes and...
View ArticleMarketplace Metrics: The Three Success Factors
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses, they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem: the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are...
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Why #Hashtags are the future of monetizing social media
You can’t invite people to a party and try to sell them stuff. Pretty much every starry-eyed startup that went after eyeballs gets it by now. Over the last seven years the web has moved away from a...
View ArticleThe One Feature That Changed Social Networking Forever
What is the single most important innovation that Facebook ever came up with? Before I answer that, let’s think of the real value for users on a social network. Social networks are a classic example of...
View ArticleOwning the Transaction – Why Marketplaces Need to Think Like SaaS Businesses
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts...
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How Startups Compete with Friction in Product Design
Startups need Traction. A startup which doesn’t get discovered doesn’t go anywhere. This is all the more critical for platform businesses which rely on their users to create value and network effects....
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