https://substack.com/@saascontentwriter/p-170357615
Hey builders,
Another week, another SaaS launch that fizzled out. You know the story: stunning landing pages, sleek demos, months of hard work — and then… silence. Users sign up, poke around for five minutes, and disappear.
I’ve been watching this pattern for years, writing for bootstrapped founders like you. Here’s the harsh truth: it’s not your features, pricing, or even product-market fit.
Your product has no network.
Last month, I spoke to a founder who spent eight months building the "perfect" project management tool. Better than Trello, cleaner than Asana, packed with more features than Basecamp. Yet two weeks after launch, he had 47 signups — and only 3 active users.
Why? His team still used Slack for everything because that’s where their conversations, files, and shared context lived. Meanwhile, his shiny new tool sat empty. The difference wasn’t features. It was networks.
Andrew Chen cracked this code while scaling Uber. His book, The Cold Start Problem, explains why some products explode and others die—even with perfect feature sets. The secret? Network effects.
Think about your daily apps. You don’t use Gmail because it’s the best email client—you use it because switching means losing years of emails, contacts, and habits. Same goes for Slack, LinkedIn, your banking app. The network makes quitting painful.
Every networked product faces what Chen calls the cold start problem. No users means no value. No value means no users. It’s like opening a restaurant in an empty mall: amazing food, but no customers because no one else is there.
Chen calls this the Allee threshold—borrowed from ecology. Just like goldfish survive toxic water better in groups, products need a critical mass of interconnected users to survive. Below that, even great products die.
Chen maps how companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook grew from zero to billions: