Superlinear growth

<p><a class="wikilink" href="/paul_graham/">Paul Graham</a> wrote about <a href="http://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html">superlinear returns</a> and I find it a very powerful concept. </p> <p>The idea is to focus on those activities that compound over time and that lead to a super-linear (perhaps exponential) type of accumulation. At the initial stages, numbers (of whatever you measure) are rather small and they look the same. </p> <p><a class="wikilink" href="/growth_is_a_better_indicator_than_quantity/">Growth is a better indicator than quantity</a> for small companies, if they have the ambition of becoming big, of course. </p> <p>If two competitors have linear growth, they may en up splitting the market half/half. If one has a super-linear growth, over time it'll capture the entire market ("winner-takes-all"). </p> <p><img alt="images/Pasted image 20231107082118.png" class="wikiimage" src="/images/pasted image 20231107082118.png" /></p> <p>In the end, it all comes down to a mindset. What things can we do that put us in a superlinear trajectory. After all, whether we are in a superlinear path <strong>depends on past actions</strong>.</p> <p>Growing the user-base one by one, for example, "does not scale" (see: <a class="wikilink" href="/essays/do_things_that_can_scale/">Do things that can scale</a>), but it may generate a compounding effect. I add one user, but thanks to that, two users sign up without my intervention. I add one more user, two more users sign up plus the extra two each brought. But without that initial push, no one would have ever signed up.</p>