Critical Mass
Every system has a beginning.
For this new system to gain prominence or be successful it must work hard to get it’s first customers and serve them to the best of its ability, if these early customers are happy, they become apostles for the system telling others to come be a part of it – try this product, taste this yoghurt, come to our special Jesus is healing all diseases service, …
Soon judgement time comes. Has the system acquired enough users in sufficient numbers for the system to be self-sustaining? Are the users now sufficient enough that their evangelism frees up the managers of the system to focus on other things but actively looking for more users / members, …?
This is the critical mass junction question?
No one has unlimited energy, and bank accounts are not ad infinitum, inevitably, the junction comes where you have to ask, is this stuff we are doing sustainable? Is it profitable? …
All these are proxies for the actual question : do we have a critical mass of happy members, users, customers, …, who by reason of being happy will naturally draw others into the system?
A religious group that successfully reaches critical mass, will have many people dragging their friends and family to their meetings, sharing their leaders recordings on social media, … From these actions and more, the members having reached a significant level will do all the leg work to grow the organization and the leaders will be more focused on improving their messaging, their branding, their …
A B2C software that reaches critical mass will have it’s happy users collect other’s phones and download or setup the App for them (I did this for a few people when chatGPT was released), or they will force their friends to use the App so they can both communicate (Have you ever seen a WhatsApp ad?), either way, once the critical mass is reached, the users do most of the leg work and the developers can spend their day and night improving security, data backup, UI design and shipping new features.
So then critical mass is the stage that a system / organization gets to with respect to it’s happy customers that the end of it successfully getting more users seems inevitable.
What happens when an organization does not hit critical mass?
The founders or managers will be the only source of growth for the organization and they will continue to push it with all their might getting as many customers as their efforts allow them until they run out of energy or money, or both. Critical mass is critical.
The Negative
Critical mass is a double edged sword. As it cuts one way, so also does it cut the other.
If you have hit the positive side of it and it has gotten you to be successful, beware! the water you are swimming in can also drown you.
Over time, successful organizations become rich, fat and lazy, the ultimate sign of a fat organization is that they don’t give a damn about the little things customers complaint about anymore. Anymore because they would have, when they were small, gone to the ends of the earth to attend to that little complaint, but a fat organization simply ignores it because, now we have many customers. This is usually the beginning of the end.
You see, the same customers you kept happy can be made unhappy and should you dare hit a critical mass of unhappy customers, you better have a monopoly, because if you do not, the flood gates open in the opposite direction.
Thank you for reading.