Naval Ravikant's "How to Get Rich" on: Network effects (Metcalfe's law), replication and scale

Marketing
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I wanted to discuss Navals tweets/podcast collectively titled the very cringe worthy “How to Get Rick”, specifically the parts where he discusses network effects zero marginal cost of replication and scale.

For those who aren’t yet aware of Naval Ravikant he is a pretty brilliant IMO entrepreneur, startup investor, founder and now I suppose a kind of business guru / philosopher.

I believe he discusses these topics in these links:

Spotify:

Google:

Transcript:

I think I have brought up some of this stuff before and it never made much of a splash but I think it is brilliant and these components he speaks of are critical to the success of the SAFE network IMO and so I will raise it again.

  1. Network effect
    In order for the SAFE network to achieve a level of success there needs to be a network effect with the users able to provide value to one another in the social, communication and content aspects of the network but of course and more importantly also for the network to function; farming.

How we do this? I think farming kind of takes care of itself, there is a monetary incentive and an easy one at that, all we need to do is tell people about it. the farming allows the network to function. How then do we grow the network of users to achieve a level of network effect for the network to become successful?

Naval talks about 'hooks’that provide value. In our world this means apps, websites, services and content and I suppose drilling down it means apps, websites, services and content geared towards privacy, safety, security, and freedom of speech. How do we do this?

There’s the build aspect and the marketing/communication aspect.

  1. Marginal cost of replication.
    I think we pass this gate easily. The issue will be again, communication and marketing. We pass the gate only so long as we can communicate the offer well enough to attract people who want to spend time building apps, creating content and or setting up their rigs to farm the network.

  2. Scale economy.
    Again same as low or zero marginal cost of replication I think we pass this easily so long as we get the communication and marketing right in order to grow the network and achieve the network effect.

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I think there is an important network effect to consider. If developers integrate safe network into their apps in any shape or form, it builds demand for safe network data.

This may not even be very visible to the users. They may just open/have a safe network account for one app and then lots of others start using it.

These apps may not even be particularly novel or distributed. They may just use safe network as a simple data store for configuration or a basic database, etc.

I suspect libraries to allow devs to easily build powerful apps with little effort will help enormously too.

There is lots to do, but once we have a proven test net and some stable APIs, this sort of thing can get community focus. Until that point, it isn’t worth the ROI, but that will change.

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