Virality and network effects drive organic growth.

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

The best consumer companies incorporate both virality and network effect, which are different concepts but very closely related, in order to grow their user base organically.

Virality is the idea that one user using your product introduces it to other users somehow in the use of your product, whereas network effect is the idea that the product gets better the more nodes in the network exist.

I'll give you an example from Facebook's early days. So, when you took a picture on Facebook and uploaded it, you were prompted to tag your friends, even if they weren't already on Facebook. Those friends would get an email saying, "Hey, someone's tagged a photo of you; sign up to view the photo." That's a viral mechanic.

By uploading the photo and tagging your friends, you spread it to new users. A network effect comes from Metcalfe's Law: the value of the network is the square of the nodes in a network.

What that basically means is the more people who use this thing, the more valuable it gets. So, WhatsApp is a great example of this.

My Life As an Adventure Filmmaker and Photographer (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

Taoism & The Underestimated Power of Softness

View All

Patterns in hundreds chart

So what we have in this chart is all the numbers from 1 to 100 organized in a fairly neat way. It’s a somewhat intuitive way to organize it where each row you have 10. So you go from 1 to 10, then 11 to 20, then 21 to 30, all the way to 100. And what we’…

I Accidentally Photographed Something Unknown During the Eclipse - Smarter Every Day 298

During the 2024 total solar eclipse, I captured something I haven’t been able to identify. See if you can see it. [Other people talking] Coming out. Oh, Bailey’s Beads! Diamond Ring! [Other people cheering in the background] “WHEEWWW!” [Destin] D…

Filming Glow-in-the-Dark Critters | Best Job Ever

[Music] Being a wildlife cameraman, it’s a whole discovery of technical knowledge. I’m working with Paul Merrick, who is a grantee of the National Geographic Society. Dr. Merrick studies millipedes, and we’re headed out to film them in their natural habi…

The Moment That Broke His Memory | The Long Road Home 360

[Music] I don’t think I’ve been just Carl since that day. PTSD to me is not a disorder; that is a reasonable reaction to something traumatic that you have been through. [Music] Looking back, we were also green; we had no idea what we were doing. SolarC…

Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's Director of U.S. Content on academic belonging

My name is Brian John Jude and I manage the arts, humanities, and social science curriculum here at Khan Academy. I was the first person in my family to attend college, and I remember my freshman year. The first course I was taking was in literature and …

AC analysis intro 2

So in the last video, we started working on the analysis of an RLC circuit that had a forcing function. The math for doing that gets really hard, and so what we decided to do was see what happens if we limit ourselves to using just sinusoidal inputs that …

Virality and network effects drive organic growth.

More Articles