Which came first — chicken or egg ?
The most important question in any product’s life
Everyone of you reading this, must have always been asked by someone or have come across this simple, but a tough question. Which came first — chicken or egg ? I came across this question when I was a child, merely 8 years old. I thought this was a question being asked just for laughs and I simply thought of it as a mere stupid question. But, as I grew, I realised this was the most important question in my life and maybe everyone’s life out there.
This stuck me when I launched my youtube channel. I thought that I would create great content and there would be a spread of word of mouth and soon everyone would like to watch my youtube videos and my subscribers would grow. But, to spread word of mouth, there has to be some chunk of people, already watching my video. So, in a gist, people watching my videos make my channel popular and to make the channel popular I need people watching my videos. So, this is an exact metaphor to the chicken and egg problem. Who will come first ? The same question stuck me again when I started writing on medium. I believe every creator faces this question in their creator career.
Not only creators, this question comes in any entrepreneur starting a company with an idea. To make an idea adopted by people, you need a few set of first users who then spread it among their peers. How do we bring this first set of users ?
This is where it becomes extremely important to answer the question — which came first chicken or egg? Let’s try to approach this question from the product lifecycle. When any product is launched, we have to market it at our level, and determine some strategies which help our product reach a particular audience who loves it and is ready to promote it to others. To do this, we need to find an innovative approach, an approach which is totally different from this problem. Let’s look at some examples of various startups, and see how they made their product reach first set of users ?
Facebook, used the exclusivity principle and launched Facebook to a set of Harvard students. Mark used an email list and sent the launch email to all the Harvard students and soon everybody got hooked to it. This helped to spread the word to other universities and finally to the whole world.
Instagram, when first launched was launched to some great influencers like Jack Dorsey(twitter founder) and as he twitted about it, many of his followers started using it and got hooked to it.
In the modern world, there are some inorganic ways to gain users too. These basically includes paid ads and paid views. People spend a lots of money gaining that initial set of users and beating the media platform.
Whatever approach you may choose, you have to do something different from what you are expecting to happen. If you want the chicken to lay eggs and then eggs which again transform to chicken and lay eggs again, you need to bring in at least first 2 eggs which hatch to form chickens of opposite genders, which mate and create the first chicken themselves. Maybe the first eggs might not be eggs, they may be a different organism in itself which split in 2 to form eggs. You need to bring in the warmth which will cause the 2 eggs to hatch. You have to do something extraordinary and unimaginable — close to something like big bang theory which brings things in motion and sets the ball rolling.
Some of the latest technique has been to launch the apps on IOS devices, rather than android. This helps to instil that feeling of class and exclusivity hitting the ego of people. This strategy was used by clubhouse. They also used a program in which they provided with an invite based access to the app. When the app launched for everybody and on android too, it grew mammoth bringing a million of users in a very short span of time.
As far as the question is concerned, I would like to say, it was neither chicken nor the egg. It was something beyond our imagination, a combination of different factors and energies which created a proper atmosphere for an egg or a chicken to exist in the first place. Maybe the organism, which lay the eggs for first chicken, was itself not a chicken. Similarly, we have to do something unthinkable and innovative to bring the first set of users.
I am still not able to find that one innovative strategy for my medium and youtube. But I most certainly one day, will find that unknown creature which will bring in the first set of users.
