Barton is a strong contender for the title of best consumer tech founder because of his repeated success. He’s founded three consumer companies each worth over a billion dollars with Expedia ($18.6B), Zillow ($8.8B), and Glassdoor (Said to have been acquired for $1.6B).

The Consumer tech sector, however, remains dark magic. The playbooks are far less developed—and no one’s playbook has demonstrated the repeatability of Rich Barton’s.

while some of Rich Barton’s techniques are commonly understood, his core strategy to catalyze his compounding loops is not.

The Rich Barton Playbook is building Data Content Loops to disintermediate incumbents and dominate Search. And then using this traction to own demand in their industries.

In order to grow their demand high enough to become a beneficial flywheel, Barton’s companies use a Data Content Loop to bootstrap their demand and create unique content and index an industry online (homes for Zillow, hotels and flights for Expedia, companies for Glassdoor).

“Power to the People”. His companies take power from the incumbents and give it to consumers. Instead of trying to hoard information, they are on the side of consumers and giving them more data transparency.

Rich Barton took these whispered conversations and made them public for everyone to see. Afterwards, everyone wondered why they were ever private.

Many incumbents are able to intermediate their markets and unfairly gain an edge from people’s lack of knowledge. And it’s scary to be the first to buck this trend on your own.

Creating common knowledge creates a network effect.

The more people use and trust Glassdoor, the more companies must take it seriously. And as users see more people contributing to Glassdoor, they can be more confident they’ll stay anonymous when they add their review. There are virtuous loops in common knowledge.

All of Rich Barton’s companies have primarily used Search (and word of mouth) as their acquisition channel. Search is a great channel, since it can drive significant demand at low cost.

If you had the top spot in search, the next best thing was to acquire more sites so you owned the next top result, and so on.

If you look at the sources of traffic for Barton’s companies, the vast majority of their traffic comes from search or direct. This makes their user acquisition far cheaper than any company that relies primarily on paid acquisition.

The ultimate purpose of the “Data Content Loops + SEO” strategy of Barton’s companies is to own the demand side of an industry.

Owning demand ultimately becomes its own compounding loop since becoming a trusted brand builds its own network effects. Consistently building this reputation increases people’s trust in them and makes them a go to destination.

Within the first day of launching, Zillow had a million people trying to check out the Zestimate.

Envy is the best rocket fuel.

The Zestimate also had the network effect of becoming public common knowledge. It gave power to the people, and offered leverage against brokers.

if tens of millions of people are using Zillow and it tells you your house is worth $1 million dollars, the broker may still disagree but they have to take it seriously. Thus this data content loop has a demand side network effect that strengthens with scale.

While many of Barton’s ideas–like owning demand–have become mainstream, his use of data content loops to catalyze demand for his companies is still underappreciated.