The Only Way to Grow Huge
blog.samaltman.com
The Only Way to Grow Huge
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Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#2This 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.
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#3I agree with this firmly and have often doubted if it made me a naive "non-marketer". When discussing with marketers I would often point to the idea that our funnel was already resulting in so few long term customers, why would we spend money to pour more people into such a tiny funnel? I think a really good and "enchanting" (to steal from another front-page article) first impression is necessary particularly when demoing to end users due to the large amount of products they're being bombarded with on a daily basis.
So while I agree with your overall stance, I'm worried about the implied advice to wait until your product is good enough. Since the phrase by definition is difficult to assess otherwise everyone would succeed.
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#4> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
This is a bad opening premise. Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies to me. Boeing is pretty huge and they don't sell anything directly to ordinary consumers. I would never run around marketing Pfizer products to my friends.
Take a scan down the Fortune 500 and "viral" growth companies are in the minority.
Even limiting yourself to tech companies, which I presume is all that the author was thinking of, the principle is no less general. Epic is a gargantuan EHR vendor and they grew via acquisition of other vendors, not word of mouth. Cisco did much of the same, and consider Oracle. The list goes on and on.
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#5> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. This is a bad opening premise. Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies to me. Boeing is pretty huge and they don't sell anything directly to ordinary consumers. I would never run around marketing Pfizer products to my friends. Take a scan down the Fortune 500 a…
Right. I suspect the post is mostly valid to "consumer" type companies.
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#6> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. This is a bad opening premise. Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies to me. Boeing is pretty huge and they don't sell anything directly to ordinary consumers. I would never run around marketing Pfizer products to my friends. Take a scan down the Fortune 500 a…
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Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#7This 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 sit…
I 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"
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#8[deleted]
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#9One major exception: distribution. You can also grow big off the backs of other companies. In the tech world, this has become fairly common in the advertising space. Retargeting companies, for example, can grow quickly by signing up only a few large e-commerce sites.
It's worth noting that in this scenario you often don't see regular monthly growth. Instead you get huge spikes when new customers/partners are on-boarded.
Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge
#10This is a great article, but really only applies to a small subset of companies for whom organic growth is the only way to grow huge.
An abbreviated list of counterarguments:
Epic, CenturyLink, NBC, Waste Management, Honda, Vanguard.