Cold Start Problem

No one wants to live in a ghost town. No one wants to join an empty community In the early days, it was our job each day is make sure there was good content on the front page. We'd past it ourselves, using dozens of dummy accounts. Otherwise the comma mity might dry up.

The older dating sites made it feel like you were doing work, like you were inside the office, You'd go and do work emails during the day, then go home and write more messages at night. Only to prospective dates rather than work colleagues. Tinder was different - it mule dating fun. You could sign up without filling in a bunch of forms. It's visual, you just swipe back and forth, and you could take foe minutes to do it while you were waiting in line or something like that. I's a form of entertainment.

The hardest problem to solve in creating the first atomic network is, well, attracting the hard side. Focus on attracting content creators to a new video platform, or sellers to a new marketplace, or the project managers inside a company to a new workplace app. The other side uf the network will follow.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they "undershoot" user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didnt see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads-their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called comple. mentary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype. The next big thing will start out looking like it's for a niche net

The solution to the Cold Start Problem starts by understanding how to add a small group of the right people, at the same time, us-ling the product in the right way. Getting this initial network off the ground is the key, and the key is the "atomic network"_ the smallest, stable network from which all other networks can be built.

I was there to represent the Driver Growth Team--a critical team responsible for recruiting the scarcest asset in the entire business, Uber drivers. It was a big effort for Uber—we spent hundreds of millions just on driver referrals programs, and nearly a billion in paid marketing. Adding more drivers to the Uber network was one of the most important levers we had to grow the business.

Instagram’s head of growth: “…The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this (connecting to real friends) was much better--the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user's content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn't have been able to create this feature without Facebook's network.”

Bundling a product is not the silver bullet everyone thinks. If it were that easy, the version 1.0 for Internet Explorer would have won, by simply bundling it with Windows. It didn't—IE 1.0 only got to 3% or 4% market share, because it just wasn't good enough yet. Bing is another example, when Microsoft wanted to get into search. It was the default search engine across the operating system, not just in Internet Explorer but also MSN and everywhere Microsoft could jam it. But it went nowhere. The distribution advantages don't win when the product is inferior.

The rideshare competition also shows the fallacy in believing in winner-take-all markets—instead, products compete as networks of networks, so that even when Uber's network was bigger in aggregate, it was only 50/50 in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles against Lyft. It had similar, not superior, network effects, and it became hard to make competitive headway. This model of thinking about network effects explains why bigger networks find it hard to fully defeat competitors, whether you are looking at Facebook versus Snapchat, Zoom versus the litany of videoconferencing competitors, or another battle.