When a company is racing toward product-market fit and trying to scale their product to thousands or even millions of users, it reaches a turning point. If it wants to compound growth, it needs to transition from a single product team to a people platform that can support multiple teams.
https://hackernoon.com/how-to-transform-and-build-a-people-platform-2d981bfd720f
A software platform works as an intermediary between a company’s products, users, and third-party developers, enabling new and surprising behavior. It creates an ecosystem that allows new products and services to be built at lower incremental costs.
A people platform extends and amplifies the capabilities of team members the way a software platform extends and amplifies the capabilities of its products.
Building a software platform allows you to extend the utility of a single product and save time, which allows you to stay ahead of the next innovation cycle.
“The key to investing…..is determining the competitive advantage of any given company, and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”
— Warren Buffett
Today we’re seeing that a moat—a barrier that protects a company from low-cost competitors or new, disruptive technology—isn’t enough to build a lasting business.
A moat simply buys a company time to figure out the next great business. Just like the invention of field artillery in the 16th century rendered moats obsolete, technology today is grinding down barriers to competition.
Technology makes the moat of traditional business a mere jumping off point.For tech companies, it’s always about what’s next — not simply protecting what’s here today.
For Buffett, operating as the low-cost producer in a crowded market helps a company build a moat around price. For tech companies, low prices trend towards free as a means to kickstart adoption.
https://hackernoon.com/units-of-time-are-the-new-currency-6f2cb28657cb
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all started life as revolutionary networks that brought existing real-world relationships online.Today, they are aging utilities, powering an outdated version of the social internet.
As social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram grow larger, they skew disproportionately towardsupernodes—celebrity, meme and business accounts. An estimated 8% of of all accounts are fake spam bots. The averageInstagram user posts 2.69 times a day, while the average user with over a million followers posts 8.58 times. 80 million photos are posted a day, but the average engagement rate per post is 1.1%. On Instagram, 50% of posts are generated by less than 3% of accounts.Facebook is a bit more stable because it has a cap on the number of friends you can have. Still, original sharing like posting photos to your Facebook feed or updating your status is decreasing 21% year over year.
Today it’s no longer enough to “connect the world.”
If you want to survive, don’t just build a network. You have to build a hive,and eventually a hivemind.
Innovating at Scale: The Companies That Don’t Let Size Slow Them Down
Nothing lasts forever — not even unicorns. But some unicorns live long lives. The life cycle of consumer products is depressingly predictable. A product becomes a hit because it resonates with a generation. And as time goes on, that generation matures and is inevitably replaced by a fresh set of customers with distinct tastes and perspectives.
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-companies-can-avoid-the-innovator-s-dilemma-3f980ae533a7
First you want it. Then you need it. Then everybody can’t live without it — like a utility.
https://medium.com/backchannel/lessons-learned-growing-consumer-products-550fc04c63c2
After more than four amazing years with Lolapps, I find it so hard to say goodbye to the team and to the impressive products that we’ve built together.
Over the past years we’ve built the highest quality products such as, Gift and Quiz Creator to over 50 million + users, Ravenwood Fair and Ravenskye City to over 20 million + users. We figured out how to transform our advertising based business to a virtual goods business in 2009. With a unique mentality towards quality design and content that eventually lead into publishing of third-party games, we figured out how to capitalize on huge opportunities abroad and on mobile platforms.
But most important to me is the culture we built together. Everyone we have hired is an entrepreneur and a leader in their own way. I hope to see multiple new ideas and startups emerge because of the type of people and culture we have created over the years. It’s a culture that is seen as among the strongest! I am very proud of each and every one this team and will miss you most of all.
Special Thanks to Annie Chang, Kavin Stewart, Brian Rue, AJ Cantu, Kamo Asatryan, Cory Virok, Alex Chee, Vivek Tatineni, Sergei Sorokin and Justin Rosenthal for helping me to successfully lead their company.
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