Read on Twitter
The best consumer social founders I've come across are those that don't reject the notion that they're building within a sandbox. They start with a limited but opinionated feature set, let a few thousand people into it the sandbox, and then prepare for the unexpected...
What comes next is a surprise, and that's the point. You have a philosophy about how people want to share and communicate but then you have to see if that philosophy is true once people start to use the product. That's when spontaneous behaviors emerge that you have to embrace...
Some examples: hashtags and tweetstorms were emergent user behaviors that took a life of their own, first within Twitter's walls, and then quickly spreading to other platforms. But the emergent behaviors aren't always product-related. Sometimes it's community/member-related...
In the early days at Quora, we saw that a few inmates from San Quentin were writing profound answers on the platform. It turned out that a gentleman that was running a program at the prison for training inmates on technology skills was helping facilitate their use of Quora...
He would write a question down on paper and give it to the inmate. The inmate would write the answer on paper. That gentleman would then type the answer into the Quora account on his laptop on their behalf. It was powerful stuff. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-are-some-aspects-of_b_1365685
Several of us employees went to San Quentin to spend a full day with a few of the inmates in the program learning technical skills. We embraced this spontaneous act of creation and they became some of the most profound writers on the platform...
My point is that if you're starting a new social company you should have opinions about what the product should facilitate. But be prepared for random acts of magic to happen within the sandbox you've created. Members of the community can be ingenious. You have to embrace that.
