Finding the White Hot Center

Starting with a deliberate point of view on who’s best for your network will define its magnetism, culture, and ultimate trajectory.

The tool-to-network shift is a specialized strategy—not every network is built this way. Tinder had no single-player mode, nor do communication apps like WhatsApp or Slack—these are products that need their atomic networks to quickly form, which is why smaller critical mass thresholds are better.

Although this entire phenomenon is often called market saturation, in a networked product there’s actually something more subtle going on. I think of it as network saturation, not just market saturation. Here’s how I define this term: the 100th connection for any given participant is likely less impactful than the first few, and as the network gets

Therefore, rather than go after the entire market at once, the key is to find a small segment of the market (i.e., a set of customers with similar pain points) that has a particularly difficult problem for whom your solution is indeed ten times better than the broad, nonspecific legacy solution.