Network effects help on the way up and hurt on the way down. If I get great single person utility from your service, it is less likely that I will follow my friends out of it when your service ends its stay on the hype cycle and the iTunes leaderboard. So I encourage the product teams in our portfolio to think hard about building single person utility into their products. Its a paradox of sorts but by making sure its useful to just one person you are insuring its useful to tens of millions of people.
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Video is rarely the right way for early-stage startups to communicate what their product does.
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Introducing users to a new app or set of functionality is a difficult task for which there are no easy answers. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a kind of instructional screen in which the interface is explained, either diagrammatically or through the use of elucidating circles, arrows, lines and notational text (what Apple has in the past called “coach marks”
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FriendRank crawls through your Facebook info and determines through your data, like interactions, photo tags, etc., who of your friends is worth enough to be among the 50 you’ll share with on Path.
It’s easy to make fun of this, but it’s actually a good idea to make the onboarding process easier for new users.
— Path Will Tell You Which Facebook Friends You Actually Like (March 11, 2011)
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Initially the “Popular” page was the key. It was filled with people […] it was the place to find out that you could follow anyone from around the world. Even if you didn’t have a friend on the service, you could find someone to follow on this page.
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Virality principle 3: Be useful even with no other users
