vs. Sidecar
Uber
Cold start, repeated city by city
- What it did
- Each launch written into a playbook; about 400 markets
- Sidecar
- No playbook; three cities at once, weekend nights only (2013)
Cold Start
What is Cold Start?
Chen's framework: network products must find the atomic network — the smallest group for which the product works without outside help — then solve the hard side (the participants who do more work and are harder to acquire), then tip market by market.
How Cold Start works
Network effects are not automatic; the product decisions about which side to subsidize, what the minimum viable network is, and how to bound density determine whether the Power ever materializes.
How companies won with Cold Start
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Digg · 2005–08
Seeded front page, then a page per interest
- What it did
- Founders' fake accounts filled the page until real users did (Aug 13, 2005)
- Digg
- One front page from Dec 2004; five Digg-chosen categories added (June 2006)
vs. HomeAway · 2008-12
Airbnb
Supply seeded by hand, city by city
- What it did
- 600+ bookings at the Denver convention (2008)
- HomeAway
- Bought its 710,000 paid listings of existing vacation rentals through 18 acquisitions (2012)
Also tagged: Pinterest · Shopify · Sidecar · Slack
The question to ask of a company
What is the atomic network for this product, which side is the hard side, and does the product work at that size without subsidy?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Chen + | The Cold Start Problem; atomic network; hard side |
| NFX | Nucleation; solving the chicken-and-egg problem |