Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You

by Geoffrey G. Parker

To start, the platform creates conditions such that value units can be created that are relevant to users even when the overall size of the network is small. It then strives to stimulate a burst of activity that will simultaneously attract consumers and producers in sufficient numbers to create larger numbers of value units and value-producing interactions, so that network effects can begin to kick in. Later in this chapter, we’ll show how Facebook employed this strategy to make its fledgling social network attractive to users even when the universe of potential members was very small—limited, in fact, to students at a single university.