Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

Tinder sent Wolfe to prominent colleges around the country with the same playbook, according to Joe Munoz, who helped to build Tinder’s back-end code. “Her pitch was pretty genius,” he told Bloomberg. “She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity—they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.” There were fewer than five thousand users on Tinder before Wolfe’s cross-country jaunt. By the time she returned, there were some fifteen thousand. “The avalanche had started,” Munoz said. Facebook’s early success followed a similar pattern. The company started in 2004 as a directory for college students at Harvard University and other selective colleges. It spread rapidly between young people who were already connected to each other by classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities. Like Tinder, its growth relied on a “bowling pin strategy,” where a product is adopted by a small niche, a densely connected network that already exists, like a bowling ball smashing into a tidy arrangement of pins. The social network wouldn’t have been useful if it found one thousand people randomly distributed around the world. But Facebook wasn’t trying to create new connections so much as it wanted to digitize—and, perhaps, deepen—the millions of student relationships that already existed.