| Dear readers,
You may know that I've written a book -- it's now a best-seller, and I even recorded an audiobook. The book is called THE COLD START PROBLEM, and published by Harper Business.
Think of this book as 75+ new, original essays featuring interviews with folks like Stewart Butterfield (CEO/cofounder, Slack), Emmett Shear (CEO/cofounder, Twitch), Sean Rad (CEO/cofounder, Tinder), Steve Huffman (CEO/cofounder), for Clubhouse, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and many more -- plus case studies on the historical launches of credit cards, phones/telegraphs, coupons, and much more.
⬇️Downloadable PDF preview of the book
🇺🇸Preorder: Amazon. Or if you're outside the US? Check here
Some videos and interviews: This is my first book, and… wow. My tldr; on the experience of writing a book is: OMG IT IS SO MUCH WORK. It started out benign — I thought it would be fun to do a little research to explore doing a book, and interviewed friends from Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, and many more interesting companies. 20 interviews eventually turned into nearly two hundred.
Here's a bit of the outline:
Introduction
1. What's a network effect, anyway?
2. A brief history
3. Cold Start Theory
The Cold Start
4. Tiny Speck
5. Anti-network effects
6. The atomic network — Credit cards
7. The hard side — Wikipedia
8. Solve a hard problem — Tinder
9. The killer product — Zoom
10. Magic moments — Clubhouse
Tipping Point
11. Tinder
12. Invite only — LinkedIn
13. Come for the tool — Instagram
14. Paying up for launch — Coupons
15. Flintstoning — Reddit
16. Always be hustlin' — Uber
Escape Velocity
17. Dropbox
18. The trio of forces
19. The engagement effect — Scurvy
20. The acquisition effect — PayPal
21. The economic effect — Credit bureaus
The Ceiling
22. Twitch
23. Rocketship growth
24. Saturation — eBay
25. The law of shitty clickthroughs — Banner ads
26. When the network revolts — Uber
27. Eternal september — Usenet
28. Overcrowding — YouTube
The Moat
- 29. Wimdu
- 30. Virtuous cycle, vicious cycle
- 31. Cherry picking — Craigslist
- 32. Big bang failures — Google+
- 33. Competing over the hard side — Lyft and Uber
- 34. Bundling — Microsoft
Conclusion
- 35. The future of network effects
Why this topic? I became obsessed with network effects because the products that most intrigued me in the tech industry are marketplaces, social networks, messaging apps, workplace collab tools, etc. — that can grow and grow. These products have network effects, but are unusual for how you start them. There's a "cold start problem" when a social app launches and no one's on it! You need a critical mass to make it functional. I started to organize all the stories I was hearing and organize them into a framework. It was an attempt to understand and process my own experience at Uber, and how it fit into the rest of the industry. Eventually, I wrote an outline of what I wanted to put together as a potential book. Just the outline was 30 pages… gulp. Then came the writing. A lot of writing. Then even more writing. I did some of the writing in warm, sunny places like Miami and Cabo. But a lot of it was done on my sofa. It was a lot. Then COVID. Then writing from a van, driving across the country, while avoiding people, but still writing. And in fact, I'm still in the middle of fixing sentences and polishing what's left, but it's nearly done at over 300 pages. I'm starting to look at potential book covers (one of the candidates above) and I'm very excited for y'all to read it — much more on this soon.
Thank you for reading, and more coming soon!
Andrew | 
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