Very insightful piece by Keith Rabois, advising startups to find their core value prop first and THEN blow it out.

Lesson from Keith Rabois:

Finally, Keith gave a final example with early YouTube. In their case, the 'growth hack' was an embeddable video player that would allow YouTube content to be played anywhere (at the time, a lot on MySpace). However, they needed a critical mass of videos that people actually want to embed, before it makes sense to start having an embeddable player.

Lesson: First, grow based on real value - then worry about how to amplify.

Here's another lesson from Keith Rabois: BE PATIENT.

LinkedIn had to assemble content for more than 3 years before it started accelerating growth:

After spending 3 years collecting users and building profiles, that monopoly that had been created by their underlying, steady growth allowed them to launch indexing, adding 20-30% daily growth for LinkedIn.

Josh Elman spoke at the same conference with another variation on that theme:

Purpose - What need do you solve?

Inception - How can you make users aware?

Adoption - How can you teach users to use it?

Habits - How can we keep them using it?