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What about the startups where scale is the product? Such as Reddit, Etsy, Quora, Airbnb, eBay, or any network effect/marketplace business?
by staunch 15y ago
What about the startups where scale is the product?
Such as Reddit, Etsy, Quora, Airbnb, eBay, or any network effect/marketplace business?
- alexro 15y agoYou haven't included Digg - a perfect example of getting big instead of polishing the product.
- staunch 15y agoDigg's product is crowd sourced news. They failed through poor community management not a lack of innovation in their UI.
- alexro 15y agoTheir product had numerous bugs in each new version, that drove the users away too. Had they not been on a rush, they'd probably tested more.
- brandnewlow 15y agoDidn't they fail because they were too proud to copy Reddit's subreddit structure the week after Reddit pushed it live?
- recoiledsnake 15y agoThe biggest reason was Digg v4, which was buggy, didn't have features present in the previous version and basically sold the readership to tech news outlets. By the time they fixed it, everyone went to Reddit.
- badclient 15y agoDon't the fathers of lean generally believe that if you think you've got the next FB, throw away all our advice? I believe I heard something like that on a video.
- staunch 15y agoWell that's not very helpful but it does sound honest. Unfortunately I think it means their advice wouldn't apply to a much larger class of startups than just the next Facebook.
- johnrob 15y agoInteresting question. My take would be that you need to toe the line between building something quick and dirty, and building something that can scale. If you can't get the features right then scaling is a non issue. If you do get them right, the nature of this type of business is that it will grow quickly - whether you like it or not. So you have to be able to add scale quickly or it can fall apart due to unavailability (people often attribute friendster with this outcome). These might be the hardest businesses to start, because in addition to cracking the chicken/egg problem, you have to steer a fine line between development speed and scalability.
- lfittl 15y agoSean Ellis recently did a good presentation on this, highlighting whats different for network effect businesses: http://startup-marketing.com/bringing-a-network-effect-business-to-market/ http://startup-marketing.com/bringing-a-network-effect-busin...
- staunch 15y agoI watched the video and it was quite interesting. He says pretty explicitly that he thinks network effect businesses are in the most important ways the opposite of a Lean Startup(TM). Definitely helped me think about the topic in a clearer way. Thanks for the link.
- ajessup 15y agoI think Eric's point for a business like that would be given a choice between burning time and money scaling (ie. big launch and marketing on customer acquisition) spend it on a few more iterations of refining the product, AND seeing how a small number real customers react to it.
- wisty 15y agoHow about Twitter? They made a product that couldn't scale, and are still doing OK. A DB server with 256GB of RAM, 2 sockets, and multiple SSD drives can serve a lot of queries. Use that for posts, and a few slaves for reads / caching. It will cost something like $60k plus hosting fees and maintenance. But it will certainly serve 99% of web businesses as a db. As long as your basic queries scale linearly (or maybe log-linearly), you can buy your way out of the kind of trouble most web companies would kill for.
- staunch 15y agoThis topic has nothing to do with scaling in the technical sense.