For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.

Keith Rabois, a general partner at Founders Fund, has another way to think about the concept of network effects. He relates it to what he calls “accumulating advantages.” When Rabois hears a pitch, he looks for evidence that the startup can build momentum so that the business is likely to be more successful every day. “Sometimes you can talk yourse

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Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before a... See more

impressive things accomplished by small teams.

• Instagram  had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. They had 30 millions users at the time. Source


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• Mojang  (the company behind Minecraft) had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. At that time, Mojang had revenue of about $290 mil

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