Social media, ultimately, is mostly just about entertainment, not utility. But, if you have a network like Uber or Lyft, you’re ultimately about getting someone from point A to point B. That’s not really an entertainment-based product. So your competitive set may be more limited.

It’s ve...

If a centralized provider can guarantee the scarcity of that virtual good, then it actually does have emotional value. People who play League of Legends all know how hard it is to acquire certain types of equipment in that game and there’s a flourishing aftermarket for it.

In the early days of Instagram, there was a sense of progression in that they had filters and things that allowed you to feel like you were improving as a photographer. But the part of Instagram that’s challenging now, is a lot of that network is about if you have a lot of wealth or something, an...

• There’s something to the idea that humans are wired to be very, very conscious of status. It may have come from another time in mankind’s history when your status within your small tribe or group was actually critical to your survival.
• That carried over to the modern world — and the ...

In the first decade or two of the web and the smartphone, everything was really focused on efficiencies achieved from going asynchronous.

In every field, you can see there are huge gains to going asynchronous.

But we’ve lost that social feeling of community that comes from synchronici...

We have long held this idea that there will someday be this kind of Metaverse-like world that more of us live in. We actually have already partially transitioned into it with our smartphones. We’re not necessarily wearing VR headsets and spending all our days like those people in Wall-E. But most...

Because games are continuous, interactive experiences. The user in a game will churn out if he’s not feeling the right balance of:

• Challenged
• Motivated
• And rewarded

That same principle can be applied to a lot of other products. How products take off = a lot ...

Mental frameworks that are more common in business and analysis tend to be more focused on things that are measurable or easily measured, which often is some sort of utility-based function. It is much harder sometimes to measure that emotional quality.

If you’re in a tech world where you have winner-take-all dynamics and network effects, where you have things that are absolutely free and infinitely available, well, at the edges of that, the old prescriptions kind of break down.

If you’re allowed to define scarcity on any axis, th...

An understudied and overlooked aspect of product design is that a lot of times, people use products that just make them feel good.

People in the gaming world have an intuitive understanding of how important this is — how important it is, moment to moment, to track your user’s emotional vale...

All product people have had it beaten into their heads that, “Hey, you’ve got to remove friction from every process in your app. From the signup flow to this flow, everything has to be fast and easy.” That is not necessarily good.

We have to start distinguishing, at the product des...

Every product person or entrepreneur moving forward needs to have familiarity with the tactics and strategic understanding of this important point: Structurally, when determining how you build your product, part of what you’re doing is defining what scarcity means on your platform.

Why do some networks succeed and others fail? One consistent pattern of successful networks is that they have scarcity early on so that people can signal status, and then over time the network moves toward providing more utility. Humans are hard-wired for status games, so product...

You can think of all of the things like sales ranking and customer review ratings as a game. There is always some sort of proof of work. There is some hurdle that you have to do to capture that amount of status. And if you can define some unique form of proof of work, then you ma...