Cold-starting new networks (0-100 users)
User retention, network growth data, scar tissue wisdom
It's famously difficult, but when network effects kick in, they carve out a wide moat that can be incredibly difficult to displace. This lens assembles excellent advice and stories from founders as they grew their user base. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned here is: build a product that one person loves vs. what 1m people might like.
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The Basics

  • A Primer on Network Effects From Andrew Chen's The Cold Start Problem

  • Status as a Service (Social Capital and Internet Networks)

    • Early days can suck

  • Founders of YouTube were depressed at their cold-start

  • Sam Altman: No One Is Honest About How Bad the Early Days Are.

    • Founders on the Cold-Start

  • Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on “living your product” and why slow growth can be invaluable

  • Quora's Cold-Start

  • Scoring the first 50 users on Quora

  • Ben Silbermann shares two lessons from the early days of Pinterest

  • John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe

  • Kevin Systrom explains how he made Instagram go viral

  • Instagram Pivot Gains Millions of Followers - Kevin Systrom, founder - Lean Content

    • VC / Operator Advice

  • Naval Ravikant’s advice to startup founders: “Stay small until you’ve figured out what’s working”

  • From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy

  • Lessons Learned Scaling Airbnb 100X

  • Come for the tool, stay for the network

  • Growth Data for the Internet's Social Platforms

    • Facebook Growth Learnings

  • Growing Facebook to a Billion Users: Growth, Myths and Anecdotes

  • Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users

  • Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users

  • How to Get Users and Grow - Alex Schultz, VP of Growth at Facebook - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

  • Details and structure matters: lessons from Facebook’s foundation in 2004

    • Andrew Chen Selections

  • How to solve the cold-start problem for social products

  • Why retention is so hard for new tech products

  • Always Be Launching

  • The Cold Start Problem (Book)

    • Post-Mortems

  • Why Google+ Failed

  • Will Clubhouse ever “come back”?

  • Nikita talks Twitter vs Facebook user activation #tech #venturecapital #startup #founder

  • Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

  • Musical ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community 2016 [the roots of TikTok]