Slack: A Failed Game That Became a $27B Tool
How Tiny Speck turned the ashes of Glitch into the fastest-growing workplace product of its era.
Instagram: The Pivot From Burbn to Photos
Why killing a cluttered check-in app and keeping one feature created a billion-dollar product.
Netflix: Cannibalising DVDs to Win Streaming
How a profitable mail business deliberately disrupted itself before someone else could.
Airbnb: The Long Road to Product-Market Fit
Cereal boxes, door-to-door photography, and doing things that don’t scale to find demand.
Superhuman: Engineering Product-Market Fit
How Rahul Vohra turned a fuzzy feeling into a measurable, improvable PMF score.
Figma: The Multiplayer Bet on the Browser
Why a four-year R&D slog on WebGL and real-time collaboration beat incumbents with a head start.
Duolingo: Growth by Streaks and Gamification
How relentless A/B testing of habit loops turned language learning into a daily ritual.
Amazon Prime: The Bet That Built a Flywheel
Why free shipping that looked financially reckless became Amazon’s deepest moat.
Spotify: Discover Weekly and the Personalisation Edge
How a side project using playlists-as-data became one of Spotify’s strongest retention drivers.
Notion: Surviving a Near-Death Rebuild
Why throwing away the codebase and almost running out of money set up the comeback.