Growth and Engagement Hacking
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Infinite Virality: The magic of C2C customer management tools
One of my earlier posts discussed the inherent advantage that some products enjoy while trying to solve the chicken and egg problem that plagues two-sided markets: Do you get the consumers first or the producers and how do you get one without the other. One of the solutions (described here) lets you seed the platform [...]
Incentives: How To Engineer User Growth and Virality
One of the factors that make or break an early stage startup is its ability to acquire users cost-effectively. Startups are increasingly innovating around their user acquisition strategies to acquire users through viral mechanics in the hope of reaching the all-important critical mass without having to spend a fortune. Most viral acquisition is built around [...]
Naturally Viral: How To Design Your Platform For Self-Expression
Why would a user talk about your product? Often, it’s because your product is really cool and helped them do something that they would never have imagined possible. But users don’t want to be talking about your product all the time. A great way to ensure users keep spreading the word around without even explicitly [...]
Growth Hacks of Q&A Startups
A lot of Q&A communities have been mushrooming lately. Why the sudden surge in Q&A communities? Q&A dates back to the early internet days when forums abounded. Forums are based on an outdated model which suffers from lack of identity of participants and results in trolling and noise (and hence, poor navigation and discoverability of [...]
Permalinks: The Key To Building Platforms That Grow With Usage
Off-platform discoverability is a key problem that platforms need to solve. Platforms that rely on user-generated content can smartly solve for disocverability leveraging their contributing users.
Zynga’s Fall And Facebook’s Evolution As A Viral Marketing Platform
Facebook is a social network based on real identity. This makes it unsuitable for spam and irrelevant viral invites. Zynga’s recent fall only proves that Facebook is sub-optimal for spammy acquisition.
How Not To Go Viral: Social Spamming
The problem with viral design is that it has become less of a design issue and more a fad in recent times. Viral designs are forced onto products because they’re ‘supposed’ to work. However, as with all fads, the execution can be counter-productive.
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.
