General partner at a16z, author of The Cold Start Problem
Distribution
The smallest group that has to be connected at the same time, doing the same thing, before the product is worth using. Two or three for Zoom, hundreds for Tinder.
there's this idea of an atomic network which is how many people need to be connected at the same time doing the same thing in order for that product to be valuable and it turns out for a product like Zoom you just need two or three people
Andrew Chen
says a network product has a threshold: some number of people connected at the same time doing the same thing, or the product is worth nothing to any of them. Ten thousand users spread one per company is a product nobody can use while the dashboard reports growth.
says recruit users one by one, by hand, and do the unscalable work that delights them. The manual work is the point, because it teaches you what to build and it is how every startup that looked like it took off actually started.
From The Atomic Network
