Awan: Here’s some advice to others as they focus on growing their own company: Make sure you have product-market fit before you invest in growth. What that means is you have validated that your product is in a market with large demand and your product is satisfying the need for users who try the product. You can measure this by retention rate which is essentially the percentage of your users who keep coming back. If your retention is not stable, you’d want to improve the product first rather than wasting resources on growth. Prioritize growth from the very beginning and build it right into the product. It’s much better for your users to bring other users to the product as they create and share photos or other content or, invite others in the course of normally using the app than to try growing through marketing that feels bolted onto the product. This is critically important if your product has network effects because the product value is limited for early users if the network doesn’t grow fast enough. As your company starts to scale, it’s important to create a dedicated multi-disciplinary growth team covering product, design, marketing, engineering, data science, and business operations. In a startup, a single person may be playing multiple of those roles (an engineer who’s also the data scientist) but as you scale, you can create dedicated functional roles.

The platform currently has over 500 Million users in over 200 countries and territories, 80% of which consider professional networking important to their career success.

About 600,000 people visit News Genius a month, Lehman said, a figure that had grown 10 times since before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. And the number of people who annotate a post on Genius each month is now at 10,000, up 30 percent from the start of the year. “More people are using News Genius now than ever,” Lehman said. Meanwhile, overall traffic to the website and apps has grown to 62 million a month.

Soon after, Genius made a definitive push to realize Andreessen’s vision. By 2015, Genius claimed 40 million visitors to its website a month, 1 million of whom had annotated a post.

But the biggest problem with the annotator from Genius’ perspective is that few individuals are using it. After more than two years of development, the Chrome extension has only 12,320 users. It was last updated in June 2016.

We know what happens to unhealthy projects over a long enough time period, more maintainers leave, contributions eventually fall, and if we’re lucky users leave it. When we aren’t so lucky adoption continues and years later we’re plagued with security and stability issues in widely adopt software that can’t be effectively maintained.The number of users a project has is a poor indicator of the health of the project, often it is the most used software that suffers the biggest contribution crisis.

If efficiency incentives and tools have been effective for utilities, manufacturers, and designers, what about for end users? One concern I’ve always had is that most people have no idea where their energy goes, so any attempt to conserve is like optimizing a program without a profiler.

n Saul Carliner’s LessonsLearned from Museum Exhibit Design, exhibit design is broken into three main stages(2003). The “idea generator,” “exhibit designer, and “idea implementer,”leads each phase respectively (Carliner, 2003). The idea generator determines the main concepts or themes and chooses the content of the exhibit. Then, the exhibit designer takes the concept to prepare physical designs for the new gallery, creating display cases and deciding wall and floor coverings for the overall ambiance. Lastly, the idea implementer brings together everything to create the exhibit. The implementer collects any missing pieces for the gallery, ensures conservation of displayed pieces, and oversees all parts of the assembly(Carliner, 2003)