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This is not necessarily true for social apps where number of active users are actually a feature. Your app itself might be great, but if you don't have active u
by jsnk 13y ago
This is not necessarily true for social apps where number of active users are actually a feature. Your app itself might be great, but if you don't have active users, say good bye to ever growing big. This is also true on the contrary. If you happen to have started some service before others (Craigslist, dare I say Hacker News), even though the app itself might not be as good, because of the people you have on the site, it will win out against superior apps that have smaller number of people.
- cconger 13y agoI think this is a little bit of a trap. Sure the number of people on the service are a feature and almost a meta-feature since it usually enables or multiplies the fun of other features. However the real value is number of active people on the service (which you did write). Those people were enchanted before I, as a new user, showed up. Therefore there is some orthogonal benchmark of quality or delight is required. These features I believe are what make someone get excited and share your app which then makes it amazingly social and draw in "the good people"
- brc 13y agoYou have to look at it at a different level. Build something customers want is implicitly 'something they want more than the current options they have'. If the thing they don't have is clearly inferior, then no problem. This applies to completely new ideas. When you have a site like Facebook or Craigslist which has very large network effects, to bust into that you have to produce something people want more than those. That is a very difficult - though not impossible - thing to achieve.