vs. HipChat
Slack
Collaboration network effect
- What it did
- Shared channels across companies from 2017; more than four per paying customer by 2019
- HipChat
- Guest links, the option Slack declined; no cross-company network
Collaboration & exchange network effects
What are Collaboration & exchange network effects?
Participation by relevant colleagues or counterparties makes communication, shared work or information exchange more useful.
How Collaboration & exchange network effects work
Participation by relevant colleagues or counterparties makes communication, shared work or information exchange more useful.
How companies won with Collaboration & exchange network effects
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. InVision
Figma
Network effects: colleagues and the talent pool
- What it did
- Designers, PMs and engineers in the same files
- InVision
- Figma overtook it for prototyping by 2019
vs. Sermo
Doximity
Colleague network tipping by hospital, city, specialty
- What it did
- Tangney: tipping came hospital by hospital, city, specialty (2014)
- Sermo
- U.S. membership plateaued near 130,000 by 2012, growing about 4% a year
vs. Digg · 2011–24
Network effects inside each community
- What it did
- Over 100,000 active subreddits, 500+ with a million subscribers
- Digg
- Users followed topics, not people, so leaving Digg was easy (Gottheil, 2010)
Also tagged: Bloomberg · Facebook / Meta · LinkedIn · Procore Technologies · Snowflake · Xero
The question to ask of a company
Which additional colleague or counterparty improves existing participants’ work, and can they exchange through competing tools?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| NFX | Personal utility (adapted to collaboration and exchange) |
Note. This label adapts NFX’s personal-utility category to working groups and counterparties. Information exchange does not establish learning from pooled usage data. Unrelated users may add no value.