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.

What if the Earth Was Flat?

Making line plots with fractional data

View All

15 Truths about Success You Wish Someone Told You Sooner

The most expensive cost in life is the unseen price that you pay on the information you don’t have. Some people spend decades figuring things out and wishing they would have found the answers sooner, and this video allows you to bypass all of that. Here a…

The Bizarre Behavior of Rotating Bodies

I want to thank the sponsor of this episode, LastPass, which remembers your passwords so you don’t have to. More about them at the end of the show. What you are looking at is known as the Dzhanibekov effect, or the tennis racket theorem, or the intermedi…

Multiplying by j is rotation

Okay, there’s one more feature of complex numbers that I want to share with you, and we’ll do that down here. So, our definition of j is j squared equals minus 1. Now, what I want to do is a sequence of multiplications by j. This is a really important pr…

Saving Orangutans in Sumatra's Disappearing Rain Forests | Nat Geo Live

Panut: In Sumatra, the Leuser Ecosystem is one of the largest and most intact tropical rainforests left in Southeast Asia. It is the only place in the world where you have Sumatran tigers, Sumatran rhinos, Sumatran elephants, and orangutans living togethe…

Is Dust Mostly Dead Skin?

This is me at the end of college. So anyway, today I’m packing up my room. It is absolutely disgusting. There’s dust all over the place. Unbelievable how much dust this place accumulates; just unreal. 21-year-old me was apparently fascinated by dust, but …

Khan Academy thanks our teachers

To Mrs. Cordell, my fourth grade teacher, to Miss Peterson, to Mr. Garland, to Mr. Jones, to Miss Wolfe, here, Mrs. Young, Mr. Chavez, Mr. Bodhi, fifth and sixth grade, to Mr. Blake, to Mr. Lester, to Mr. Howard, to Mr. Zarnicki, Dr. John, to Mrs. Alvarad…

Virality and network effects drive organic growth.

More Articles