When Growth Becomes About Network Value

Growth is not always about acquiring more users. For network businesses, the real value comes from making the existing users useful to one another through complementary resources, shared capabilities and meaningful connections.

The Problem With More

There is something mildly disturbing about being a marketer and deliberately trying not to acquire too many users.

Almost every instinct I have developed professionally points in the opposite direction.

More reach is good.

More leads are good.

More registrations are definitely good.

At least, that is how growth usually appears on a dashboard.

Working on Lab2Lab has made me much less certain.

Because 500 laboratories registering on a platform can look impressive and still create very little actual value if none of them can meaningfully help one another.

Twenty laboratories can look insignificant by comparison.

But if those twenty have complementary resources, respond to each other’s requests, share capabilities and return when another problem appears, something much more important has started to happen.

The network is becoming useful.

This sounds very obvious once you say it.

It still feels surprisingly unnatural to optimise for.

Measuring Network Density

There is a peculiar comfort in large numbers. They make progress visible. A graph goes up, a funnel fills, a campaign appears to be working.

Network density is much less visually satisfying.

Sometimes progress looks like one laboratory finding an instrument it could not access before.

Or another solving an urgent material shortage.

Or two people who did not know each other last week now having a reason to work together again.

Five successful connections do not look particularly impressive in a marketing report.

But they may matter much more than five hundred passive accounts.

What Happens Between Users?

I think this is changing the way I look at growth itself.

We usually measure how many people move through a system.

I am becoming much more interested in what starts happening between them once they are inside.

And, strangely, I find that quite liberating.

The question becomes less:

How do we make this number bigger?

And more:

Did anything genuinely useful become possible because these people are now here?

A Different Definition of Growth

Perhaps growth is not always the number of people entering a system.

Sometimes it is the number of useful things the people already inside can suddenly do together.