Comment by jimkoen
2 years ago
I had to look up "superlinear growth" because I've never seen that term used under posts with VC related topics. If you're as confused as me, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about this last October (figures):
http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
tl:dr: Just make a product that's so cool it'll go viral in it's respective market.
so basically exponential but fancier.
The reason I don't use the world exponential, is that superlinear growth in a product is generally not exponential.
It is usually at best quadratic because there is some kind of network effect at play - the number of edges in a complete graph with `n` vertices is `n(n-1)/2`.
The point is that the value of your product to your users should increase with the number of users OR the marginal cost to you of maintaining the product should decrease with the number of users.
"Superlinear" captures that more effectively than "exponential".
True viral growth is exponential: each of your users gets you N>1 additional users, and so the growth of your userbase is proportional to your current scale.
Superlinear but subexponential growth can still be pretty impressive, though, especially if it's fast (who cares about 0.1% weekly growth?)
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Less specific than exponential which also makes it more achievable. More positive than nonlinear.