Thread by @petergyang

📈 The single best analogy that I've heard for growing a platform and community from scratch is from Alex Zhu at Bytedance.

Thread 👇

1/ Building a community is like discovering a new land.

Let's say you just discovered America and you want people from Europe to migrate to your country.

How?

2/ Europe is very developed, but in America, there's no population and no economy.

Yet Europe isn't all sunshine and roses.

3/ The problem with Europe is the social class is already stabilized. An average European, has no chance to go up the social class.

4/ So in America, you should start with a centralized economy.

Make sure the majority of reach and wealth is distributed to a small percent of people.

5/ These people will then become role models for the average person in Europe.

People in Europe will think: "This is a normal person who went to America and became rich, I can do the same."

FOMO will cause these people to come to America.

6/ But when more people come, you have to decentralize the economy.

Having an American dream is good, but if it only remains a dream people will wake up.

7/ You have to shift the opportunity to average people and make sure that a middle class can rise up.

8/ tl:dr

1) Help a few early users become stars on your platform. Help them build audience and make money.

2) Attract more users from FOMO.

3) Decentralize the wealth to help the middle class - make the American dream possible on your platform.

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