Online photo-sharing platform
Noticed one feature showing pull: Users were using and loving one feature of the game.
An online role-playing game called "Game Neverending"
Growth plateaued
https://mastersofscale.com/stewart-butterfield-the-big-pivot/ https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending https://stoweboyd.com/the-game-neverending-an-im-community-63ef74e067b1
“We were never going to raise money for the game. I had tried everything. I had put all of my savings into it, we had tapped out friends and family. We had more or less worked through all of the very small amount of angel investment we were able to get. We had this game interface. In the game, you had an inventory, you could pick up objects. We made that inventory a shoebox full of photos. And you could do interesting things, like drag photos around on to group conversations, and they would pop up on the other person’s screen. You could annotate them in real time. And there was chatting in the game, so you could talk to the fellow players—that became a cornerstone of Flickr. Here’s the twist, though, that was the first idea for Flickr, which was actually, really, a terrible idea that had a lot of technological innovation, and so it wowed a lot of people, but it wasn’t a very useful product. Maybe three months in, it was pretty obvious that Flickr had legs. So people started to use it, people were talking about it, it got a lot of good press.” —Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder
3 months
One piece of tech