how do platforms succeed? (part 2)

Actions and behaviors a platform curator must nurture in order to have both producers and consumers extract value from the platform 
 
On the producer side: 

• Create: make it easy with neat content creation interfaces
• Curate: that’s the job of the platform curator!
  • Editorial – useful for pattern detection that can be automated and scaled
  • Algorithmics – detect good vs. bad activity, based on rules (avoid false positives that would reject good creations)
  • Social – leverage distributed and networked nature of platforms, give community tools such as voting, flagging, upvote/downvote and aggregate all of this to sort and rank, and increase discoverability of the best producers (useful as social proof, useful for producers as feedback)

On the consumer side:

• Customize — that’s what the platform curator designs
• Consume — that’s what consumers. Encourage this with feeds and widgets (presenting the right information at the right time to the right person)

Designing for Producers

• Think value, costs, incentives — the value, costs, and incentives that matter to producers: what are the set of actions that make it easy and simple (and fun) for producers to create core value units?
  

• Reduce the friction. Give them access to consumers (without commensurate investment), and tools to make creating very simple. If possible, “break the skill barrier” — make them look good without making them work hard for it. (This is why people pay money to sit in restaurants with candles. Candles make us all look good.)
  

• Build Cumulative Value — value that scales as the producer uses the platform more often, which will increase the repeatability and desirability of interactions.
• Reward quality
• Mitigate risk into an investment (think Nir Eyal’s Hooked model)
• “Scale the country club” — don’t be for everyone! Act like a nightclub bouncer, and encourage the right quality and perceived quality of producers. Any additional friction should signal quality. If you add friction, ask: does it improve quality? Does it signal quality? Does it increase the repeatability of desirable interactions? (Also, is the interaction high value, high risk? In which case, trust is more key than ever.​
  

How to onboard producers

1. Bait
2. Friction-free feedback
3. Kill the time it takes to reach critical mass: find a hotbed of existing activity, where there’s already an overlap of supply and demand
4. Incentivize
5. Staging: capture one side at a time
   1. For example, OpenTable got restaurants (producers) on board first by providing restaurant management software (bait!) before any customers signed up (Side note: restaurants were highly fragmented tech- laggard inefficient vertical, rings a bell?)
   2. By providing management software, could aggregate table inventory, turn it into real-time data on table availability across restaurants…
   3. By doing that, OpenTable created (aggregated, accumulated) core value units -- ready to sell through the core interaction
   4. Note: you can create fake data to kick start a community: many dating sites have done this (this is called synthetic datasets)
      

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Designing for Consumers

• Value, costs, incentives — the value, costs, and incentives that matter to consumers -- what are the set of actions that make it easy and simple (and fun) for consumers to consume core value units?
• Curate -- to “separate the award winners from the bathroom singers”, the signal from the noise

 

• Editorial curation -- Useful to discover patterns that can be automated and scaled
• Algorithmic curation -- To detect good vs bad behaviors
• Social curation -- The best way to scale curation… and the best way to get to trust.
  • Up/down-voting
  • Rating
  • Flagging -- useful signal (it’s a form of value) for producers: motivates them to create

 

• Build cumulative value -- get consumers to invest in small actions and over time use these to improve the customization filters, and increase the value they get from your platform​​

How to get Producers and Consumers to stick around

Customization: to scale quality, better data, better filters -- In order to Customize, a platforms filters have to work ever better. Ideally, the platform should encourage users to make small actions that increasingly improve the filter, so it’s easier to customize the offer: this way, despite abundance, the platform can still deliver relevance.
 
The filter should take the core value unit and match it to what a consumer wants based on:
 

• Active intent (example: specific search)
• Passive context (example: feeds, suggestions, insights)
• Point-in-time information (“what’s going on right now?”)
• Cumulative data (“based on your previous actions”, usage behaviors)
• Aggregated social data (“other customers like you also liked…”)​
  

Make sure long-term investment gives producers:

1. greater reputation
2. more influence

 
Make consumers stick around:

1. Improve the filter so the matching is better
2. Reward them for more engagement
3. Give them variable rewards (read the book Hooked again!)
4. Re-activate deactivated users with off-platform notifications
5. Activate them in the first place
6. Set future triggers (Read the book Hooked again!)
7. When onboarding (and when they see the spreadable unit — that’s virality) show benefits

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​My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 
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Head of Digital Product
thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader