You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.
Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.
At the end of the day, how many ads did it take to convince you to use Facebook or Twitter? It wasn't marketing or advertising that convinced you to use these services. It was their value.
With Spotify, people don't get it until they try it. Then they tell their friends.
The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.
A design isn't finished until someone is using it.
With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.
We've had customers from the beginning. The reason people use Dropbox is because they really love it. We think more about who is going to be competing with what we are going to be doing, not with where we started.
It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.
What's culturally significant about MySpace is that it has become so pervasive that people of all ages are now using it. Even people who didn't grow up with it are getting used to it. People just get sucked in.
But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.
Here's the thing about Apple technology: once you own a piece, you want to use it.
Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.
While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.
You want people using your product because it's a part of your life, then they can't stop using it.
We're simple-minded, the team at Hulu, which is, we think if we can obsess over quality and build a better mousetrap, that good things will happen. Users will adopt the service, advertisers will see great value in it, and that's what we're seeing.
It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it.
I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today.
If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.
There's always a momentum in how users do stuff. Making small changes can have huge knock-on effects for whole companies.
One of the companies that we've invested in is called Facebook. In only two years, between 2009 and 2011, the information exchanged between people increased 28 times. And that cannot be explained by new people joining Facebook.
You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
You can throw - and we've seen plenty of these kinds of companies - millions of dollars in advertising for a website or a service, and in the end if it's not useful no one's going to use it.
Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
