Success: No Shortcuts, Only User Growth
Screenshots of the early websites of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Stripe are quite simple and plain. Many people might think: can something as basic as this really grow into a company valued at hundreds or even thousands of billions?
Twitter originally started as a group text-messaging service. With a 160-character SMS limit, users needed to send commands like “follow,” “tweet,” or “delete” along with a username, leaving only 140 characters for actual content. That’s how the 140-character limit came to be.
YouTube began as a dating website that happened to support video uploads. Eventually, users stopped using it for dating and started posting all sorts of videos instead. The founders dropped the dating feature and kept the video-upload function. Through Archive.org (a VPN may be needed outside the U.S.), you can see how the site’s design changed every few days in 2005.
Stripe is now a hot payment-services startup based in San Francisco and also a Y Combinator company. Its original name was even better: /dev/payments — immediately signaling that it was built for developers.
Facebook initially had just a single personal profile page where users could add friends, but there was no interaction between them. Later, Facebook added numerous features to boost user engagement, all aimed at one goal: growing the user base as fast as possible.
A common joke goes like this: in Facebook’s early days, whenever an employee proposed building a new feature, Mark Zuckerberg would write a giant “Growth” on the whiteboard to remind everyone that every decision should serve user growth.
What people often see is an app suddenly sold for hundreds of millions overnight, while ignoring the countless attempts behind the scenes.
Before being acquired by Zynga at a sky-high price, Draw Something had released 34 obscure games. Before Angy Birds blew up, it too had launched 51 unknown titles. Before building Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had created innumerable small apps.
Success has no shortcuts.