Chamath Palihapitiya explains how to find your product's magic moment: start with highly engaged users, work backwards to see what actually got them there, then funnel more people into those same paths. He warns against growth hacks like spam emails or dark patterns before you've nailed the core engagement.
Chapters
So in that process, we're like, oh, my gosh, there's these weird things that are happening. And, you know, you rinse and repeat through all these cohorts and you're like, why does these. Why did these people get into a certain space and are now fully engaged and ramped up and have these vibrant networks? And these people didn't. And we just tried enough things where we were able to back into that axiom being the sort of, you know, the definitive sort of thing that defined how things work for us. But for you, it's going to be different. But it started, I mean, if I had to give you a framework, it would probably be, you got to start with a broad cross section of engaged users. And when you work backwards from each of those and you are smart enough and clever enough to really figure out the different pathways in which they got to that place, you can probably tease out what those simple things are. And then hopefully, and I think most products are structured this way, you can then sort of path people more and more of those people into those same click flows that allow them to get to that state. But again, it starts with looking at an engaged user, not just thinking about how many emails can I send and how do I trick everyone to click on a select all or not unselect the select all. No offense, we did that too, but I mean, we did that after we figured that shit out.