Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

Remember Watts’s and Leskovec’s rules for popularity: Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people. In other words, if you’re trying to attract groups, find common points of origin. To build an early user base, Wolfe had to go somewhere hundreds, hopefully even thousands, of single people were already connected. So she went back to school. Wolfe had graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which is well known for its culture of bacchanalia. She understood what she called “the Southern college experience.” To find users, she first went to the sororities. “I’d walk into the house and I’d ask them to download Tinder as a favor to me,” she said. “I would tell them I was a young working woman who needed their support, and also, by the way, every cute guy on campus was going to join this thing in the next twenty minutes, because I was walking straight to the frat houses after I left.”