If you study the launch of products with network effects, you’ll see that one of the most common threads is that they often start small, in a single city, college campus, or in small beta tests at individual companies—like Slack’s story. Only once they nail it in a smaller network do they build up over time to eventually conquer the world. If you can create one stable, engaged network that can self-sustain—an atomic network—then likely you can build a second network adjacent to the first one. And if you can build 1, and then 2, you can probably build 10 or 100 networks. Copy and paste many
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