Growth
Building Online Marketplaces: A checklist for Disruption
Marketplaces employ the platform business model by connecting buyers and sellers and enabling them to transact. I have written a lot about marketplaces in earlier posts on this blog. Nir Eyal and I have collaborated in the past and we got together again to make this post happen. Bill Gurley had written an interesting post [...]
The network effect playbook: Social products win with utility, not invites
Note: This essay was first featured as a guest post on Andrew Chen’s blog. It’s one of the best resources out there for internet startups. The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction. Traditionally, startups [...]
How to become a billion dollar startup: AirBnB, YouTube and Platform Thinking
Note: This essay was first featured on TheNextWeb Technology startups are disruptive because they are driven by a desire to solve an unsolved problem in a unique way and create new value. Most large and established companies, in contrast, are driven by a desire to defeat competition and protect their market turf. Consider the problem [...]
A Platform Thinking approach to building a business
Every business is an engine. It needs to do a certain set of things repeatedly to create value. If you haven’t figured out that set of repeated operations, you probably haven’t created a scalable business yet. Ford needs to repeatedly assemble cars, Google needs to repeatedly run its crawler, Facebook needs to repeatedly get users [...]
Growth = Engagement: A product design principle you can’t ignore
Newly launched startups love to see their traffic and sign-up stats grow. Growth, after all, is opium for a startup fresh out of the door, and frequent refreshes of the sign-up logs are the happiest pastime for entrepreneurs. Startups often tend to think of growth and engagement as two unrelated divorced concepts. In reality, nothing [...]
How to crack User Generated Content: A Presentation
Note: I’m embedding a presentation from a talk I recently gave on the topic of user contributions based largely on earlier posts on this blog. The presentation ended up on the #1 spot on Slideshare on the day it was uploaded: Platform businesses like YouTube, Quora, Flickr etc. have little value when users aren’t contributing. [...]
Reverse network effects: Why scale may be the biggest threat facing today’s social networks
Note: This article first appeared as a Guest Column on The Next Web. Network effects are the holy grail for Internet startups looking for venture-scale returns. On a platform with network effects, the value to a user increases as more users use it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype and many others benefit from this dynamic. [...]
How to get users to contribute on a creativity platform
Let’s loosely define creativity platforms as platforms that allow creators to express themselves, and possibly get an audience for their ‘creations’. YouTube, Dribbble, 500px, Instagram, Flickr… the list goes on. A platform without creators is a ghost town and there is little incentive for consumers to use it. Replicating the technology of YouTube is a [...]
How to build a two-sided marketplace with the Yelp model… and why Craigslist hates it!
I’ve talked about the chicken and egg problem in seeding two-sided marketplaces at length earlier. Producers won’t show up without Consumers and vice versa. One of the models that I’d proposed, that works especially well for startups like ShopKick is to build the value proposition in such a manner that your producers bring in the [...]
Destination vs. Distribution: Why your product should be where your users are!
User acquisition is a prerequisite to startup success. Startups often see user acquisition as an act of sourcing traffic to a destination and converting traffic to users. Almost every web business has a destination: a website, an app etc. The destination is often seen as the product in its entirety. Talk to a startup about [...]
Platform junkie, Singapore-based Early stage internet guy, Currently advisor to multiple platform startups.
This blog is about taking ventures from an idea to a business... and mitigating execution risk.
