I learned about S-curves recently. It was in the context of bike networks. As you add bike infrastructure, at first it doesn’t lead to much adoption because the infrastructure isn’t good enough to get people to actually use it. Then you pass some threshold and you get lots of adoption. Finally, you hit a saturation point where improvements don’t move the needle much because things are already good.
I think this is a really cool concept. I wish I knew about it when I wrote Beware unfinished bridges.
I feel like there are a lot of situations where people try to make progress on the “introduction phase” of the S-curve without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. It happens with bike infrastructure. If a startup founder working on a new social network did this, it’d likely be fatal. I’m struggling to come up with good examples of this though.
Also, I wonder if there is a name for this failure mode where you work on the introduction phase without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. Seems worth naming.
I learned about S-curves recently. It was in the context of bike networks. As you add bike infrastructure, at first it doesn’t lead to much adoption because the infrastructure isn’t good enough to get people to actually use it. Then you pass some threshold and you get lots of adoption. Finally, you hit a saturation point where improvements don’t move the needle much because things are already good.
I think this is a really cool concept. I wish I knew about it when I wrote Beware unfinished bridges.
I feel like there are a lot of situations where people try to make progress on the “introduction phase” of the S-curve without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. It happens with bike infrastructure. If a startup founder working on a new social network did this, it’d likely be fatal. I’m struggling to come up with good examples of this though.
Also, I wonder if there is a name for this failure mode where you work on the introduction phase without having a plan for actually reaching the growth phase. Seems worth naming.