The hub-and-spoke model uses existing communities as distribution channels. Gas, a social app, treated high schools as hubs and students as spokes, letting friend-driven sign-ups create network effects that made the product stronger as it grew.
This model that literally dictates all of the ways that I think about marketing of products, whether it's media or physical product. It's the hub and spoke model. Your spokes are your customers. So in the case of Gas, it's high schoolers and your hub is distribution channels. So in the context of Gas, by them going high school by high school, the high schools are the hubs and the high school students are the spokes. And the amazing part about this model for a social network is there are network effects built in by getting your friends to sign up. It actually makes the product better for you, which is obviously the power of network effects. And I think hub and spoke is such a great way to think about how do I leverage channels that get me in front of a lot of my customer so I don't have to go door by door or person by person to get them signed up for it.
Someone I know called that reverse aging for a product, like it gets better over time with more users, which I think is a really interesting way of putting that.
SF startup Eve just raised $103 million led by Spark Capital with backing from a16z and Lightspeed.
