Top Highlights

• Most products these days are low technical risk—meaning they won’t fail because the teams can’t execute on the engineering side to build the products—but they are generally also low defensibility. When something works, others can follow—and fast.
• The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value proposition. The target should be on building a tiny, atomic network—the smallest that could possibly make sense—and focus on building density, ignoring the objection of “market size.” And finally, the attitude in executing t...
• The solution to the Cold Start Problem starts by understanding how to add a small group of the right people, at the same time, using 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.
• The entire ecosystem stays on because the value is in bringing everyone together. That’s the magic. The “effect” part of the network effect describes how value increases as more people start using the product.
• Network effects are one of the only protective barriers in an industry where competition is fierce, and defensive barriers are weak. While Instagram might be able to copy Snapchat’s features like Stories or ephemeral photo messages in a few months, it’s difficult to change the behavior of millions of consumers to switch over. Larger competitors are...