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.

Making a Camp for Moose Season | Life Below Zero

Adding and subtracting on number line 2 | 2nd grade | Khan Academy

View All

Warren Buffett Explains How To Calculate Intrinsic Value Of A Stock

Yeah, the actually Graham didn’t get too specific about intrinsic value in terms of precise calculations, but intrinsic value has come to be equated with, and I think quite properly with, what you might call private business value. Now, I’m not sure who w…

Multivariable chain rule intuition

So, in the last video, I introduced this multi-variable chain rule, and here, I want to explain a loose intuition for why it’s true, why you would expect something like this to happen. The way you think about an expression like this, you have this multiv…

Checking Out the New Digs! | The Boonies

[Music] Is there anything back there? Say, is there anything back there, Joe? “See something promising looking up here. This could be… could lead us to something good. Maybe not, I don’t know.” Below the grid, Joe Ray’s Bridge has allowed him to venture…

Fractions in context

In this video, we’re going to think about how fractions can be used to represent things in the real world. So, here we’re told that on the sharks dive team, there are three divers. In third grade, there are eight total divers on the team. What fraction of…

15 Signs You Control Your Money

Yesterday we talked about people who are controlled by money. Go watch it if you haven’t already. Then come back. Today we’re talking about those who have complete control over their money: how they use it, how they think about it, and how they plan for …

Worked example: Balancing a simple redox equation | Chemical reactions | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

So what we have here is a redox reaction. Things are getting oxidized and reduced; that’s the name, redox. But we want to balance this redox reaction, and when we talk about balancing a redox reaction, we want to make sure we conserve mass and charge on b…

Virality and network effects drive organic growth.

More Articles