Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn

Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. “It would be futile and foolhardy to try to compete with Microsoft and Google in a top-down way, to build a similar product and sell against them,” says Vernal. “Instead, they found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with th... See more

Common themes emerge when you look at Slack’s strong network launch as well as the successes across marketplaces, social networks, developer platforms, and dozens of other categories. Many of them are counterintuitive: The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value propos

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So the question is, how do you get to that scale? There are a million networks that died out before they ever achieved that scale.