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The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects Kindle Edition
A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users.
Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth.
Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries.
The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Business
- Publication dateDecember 7, 2021
- File size5989 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A practical handbook for entrepreneurs struggling with how to effectively apply what can be a devilishly tricky concept." — Business Insider
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B08HZ5XY7X
- Publisher : Harper Business (December 7, 2021)
- Publication date : December 7, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 5989 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 395 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #80,408 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4 in Knowledge Capital (Kindle Store)
- #15 in Knowledge Capital (Books)
- #19 in Business Technology Innovation
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, investing in early stage startups — focused on the themes of games/entertainment, marketplaces, and next-gen social products. He is on the boards of Clubhouse, Substack, Z League, Sleeper, All Day Kitchens, Sandbox VR, Reforge, and others.
Previously, he served as the head of Uber's rider growth teams, where he focused on user acquisition, retention, and engagement during the company's meteoric pre-IPO years. He writes about user growth, metrics, and network effects at andrewchen.com and has been cited at Wired, WSJ, and New York Times. He holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington, where he graduated at the age of 19.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Trust me, this is a book you are going to want to keep, as I read a book I take notes, and the more notes I take, the better the book is, and this book is in the top five of the notes I have taken, it is chock-filled with essential observations about how to solve the chicken egg problem, with lots of case studies and lots of details from numerous companies. It's an essential book for anyone who is starting a company.
The author is clearly an insider and knows these companies from the inside as well, and you are not going to find much information in this book from other sources, for that reason. Several of the things that he has talked about I have done Google searches for, and come up completely empty, so if you believe that information is gold, as I do, that means that to not read this book is to be giving up lots of pieces of gold.
Do yourself a favor, get this book, start reading it, and after you'll have learned a valuable lesson about how essential it is to ignore negative reviews and just try things out yourself.
Among the many things I liked about the book is it’s structure that matches the “stages of the cold start framework” (Figure 8 on page 44 of the hardcover edition). The stories (“case studies” as we call them in enterprise software sales) are well written, short and easy to read.
I read the first half of the book diligently, taking notes, highlighting, re-reading sections etc. I read the second half a lot faster and skimmed quite a few sections.
Strange as this may sound, one of the best parts about the book is in the “acknowledgments” section (last “chapter”) where Andrew gives credit to everyone that helped him write and produce the book. One realizes that it takes a village to raise a child, produce a book, close a deal etc.
One final note: my standard for a truly amazing book is “is it worth reading a second
time?”. My favorite books (eg., “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Kahneman, “Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson, “The Future of Money” by Prasad, “Naked Economics” and “Naked Money” by Wheelan, “Basic Economics” by Sowell … these come to mind) are ones that I’ve read multiple times. Does “The Cold Start .. “ make that list ?
…. The answer is “no”, and the main reason is that the topic is a little dry and unrelated to my core love of economics, finance, neuroscience and lately geopolitics…
However, I recommend every tech marketeer read this book.
Awesome job Andrew Chen !
Reading this book helped me connect a number of disparate facts most of us may know about many companies of our interest- Uber, Slack, Zoom, FB, Twitch, Tinder and many more. Andrew was in the ring for many of these fights, and has had a ringside seat for many more, thanks to his role at Andreessen Horowitz. There are as many examples of when some approaches do not work, as there are of when they do work- that helps understand these concept so much better. As Tolstoy said, "All successful software companies are alike, every unsuccessful ones is unsuccessful in their own way." (my memory is a bit hazy, apologies).
If you are a high level strategy person who is not directly involved in a software company, this book may not do that much for you- it starts from the general idea that Network Effects are contexts in which the connections become more valuable as more people join the network, and then breaks it down just one level lower- think of it as the Bass Diffusion curve of SaaS products meets Network Effects, with a side of Crossing the Chasm put in (repeatedly). Nothing more to add, except a wealth of examples, giving you something to think about.
What really put the icing on the cake for me was the very last section- how it can all implode after you have taken over the world. (Don't just jump to the last section, it is a payoff for having assimilated the rest of the material).
This book will reflect where you are coming from, when this catches your eye. For a book that was published just a couple of years ago (2021), it could have received a bit more traction. My conjecture is that this may be because Mr. Chen wrote this as a way to clear his head and put his thoughts down in a structured manner, rather than become a famous pop business author. Thank you for writing this book, Andrew.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in India on July 10, 2022