Post by Pim de Witte

At 14, I grew a private RuneScape server to 3m users and $1m in annual revenue. At 22, I founded Medal, a social network for gamers, and grew it to over 10m Monthly Active Users. Here are the 10 hardest lessons I learned about building social networks and viral apps: 1. Razor blades, not swiss army knives - solve one problem really well - in a world that is information overloaded, people can only remember simple things as their attention span shrinks 2. Once people are in/through the door, the only thing that matters is retaining trust, everything else is solvable. The easiest time to get someone through the door is when they’re already experiencing a big change in life and therefore looking for something new. 3. Don’t play in arenas that are stacked against you on retention - mac, windows, android are fairly open. On desktop people are focused. On mobile, you are competing with every piece of information in the real world 4. You're only designing for how it works, not how it looks. Design is only an optimization tool for getting to value faster. What matter is that you get people to a point that proves value, and then work backwards using design. If you have something valuable, people will go through bad design to get it. 5. Once it’s clear there is value, everyone will try to get it - this is where design matters. This is why engineers should mostly do 0-1 work 6. When working with people - the simplest signal of whether they’ll be great is simply how much they care 7.  Launching things often is the only way to get signal about what’s working - I launched 6 private servers, 4 versions of Medal, by now 7 versions of Highlight. And every time you learn something new to make the best one better. Eventually you find the one thing that clicks and everything else works its way out. 8. Therefore, every minute not spent shipping is a waste of time until you have clear PMF 9. Partnerships/BD are useless because you have no value to externals until you have users. Get to PMF first. Don’t fool yourself into thinking a partnership with a bigger company will do anything until people care about your thing is in isolation 10. This is why big companies suck so much at launching new things - product managers are most incentivized to recycle interest in other things in the org into shiny user number presentations without knowing if they actually care. The few that don’t do this, and look for fundamentally new signal, win. Any questions about building social networks and consumer apps? AMA in the comments below. 👇