Here’s the full set of seven ingredients: It’s the “secret sauce” that makes your community stand out relative to the rest and is your unique innovation. One ingredient is something only you, the founder, can figure out. Six of them are knowable and I’ll go into detail on each below. I believe there are seven primary ingredients when it comes to building flywheels in software. This playbook will describe what those ingredients are, how they work, and what you can do about them in pursuit of building your own startup fueled by a flywheel. However, I do believe some of the ingredients are knowable and repeatable. There is no “secret sauce” that only Italian grandmothers and a few exceptional founders figure out. It’s 15 years old and still spreading its wings.īut how does one create such a platform driven by perpetual organic growth? Clearly, it can’t all be distilled down into a simple formula and bottled up in cans to be sold next to ketchup and mustard. To put the power of a content flywheel in perspective, Reddit recently claimed 430M monthly active users. And once that kicks in, good luck stopping it. When new content is created it fetches new traffic and users into the platform, increasing the size of the flywheel and accelerating its rotational energy. In this analogy, the user-generated content is kinetic energy. When those users create content and the content is discovered in Google, shared via social media, or distributed online through other means, then the “arrow has been shot” so-to-speak. The stockpile of registered users is Reddit’s version of potential energy. Online communities that have established a “content flywheel” behave similarly. And when it is released the arrow has kinetic energy.Īnother key point about flywheels is that the bigger it is and the faster it spins, the more energy it stores and the longer it takes to slow down. When you pull the bowstring back, you can say that the arrow has potential energy. Potential energy is the energy stored by the object due to its position. Kinetic energy is the energy that an object possesses due to its movement.
What a flywheel does is it converts kinetic energy into potential energy. It sounds like magic, but there’s a simple explanation for it-at least as simple as physics goes. The more it’s revved up, the more energy it stores and the longer it can spin unaided. In technical terms, a flywheel is a device that stores energy. The unstoppable momentum of organic growth, driven by users creating new content on the platform, is what is often referred to as the “flywheel”. Another reason is that successful online communities seem to grow perpetually through organic growth, which is the holy grail in startup land. A leading reason is that the winners tend to be massive. There are many reasons to be on the prowl for the next great online community, either as an investor or operator. Others seek to create vertical communities tailored to a particular subject and audience, such as Wheelwell for car enthusiasts. Some attempt to build large horizontal platforms where users engage on topics ranging from immunotherapy to the Boston Celtics. One of quietest tragedies of sandbox MMOs if you ask me.Īll of that to say, yep you nailed it I'm afraid.Each year a batch of entrepreneurs set out to build the next great online community. But at that point the ship had already sunk. You can see here in the last ~three months of updates they finally got their stuff together and started rebuilding the systems that needed it. So now it's just a dead title with a small but dedicated playerbase who will never get to play the game again and are left to imagine and reminisce about what the game could have been.
Worst of all, because of that software's licensing they couldn't even release open source or private server capable versions of the game when they eventually shut it all down. It was so integral to the game they couldn't switch away from it. The server technology they used was hyper expensive proprietary third party stuff, and accounted for most of their spend. Once you built the ship there wasn't a whole lot to do.Īnyway, by the time the devs figured out the problem and had just started to make new content they ran out of runway (cash). It also suffered from more or less the same problems. It was magical semi-nautical ships instead of spaceships, but otherwise same idea. It had a similar idea to DU, open world sandbox where you build your own ship. There was this game called Worlds Adrift.
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