To scale your product, you need to win over the hard side: That’s the minority of users who create disproportionate value to your product.

One of my favorite books, “The Cold Start Problem” by Andrew Chen, explains how to grow a product’s user base, using examples from well-known companies such as Slack, Tinder, Uber, Wikipedia, and more.

Growing users is all about creating network effects. To understand what a network effect is, consider the telephone: The value of the telephone system increases exponentially with the number of users joining the network. It’s the same for all SaaS products that require user interactions.

In this article, I will discuss one of the key concepts needed to succeed in the early stage of a networked product: The hard side.

What Is The Hard Side?

In every network, there is a minority of users that create disproportionate value and, as a result, have disproportionate power.

This is the hard side of your network. They do more work and contribute more to your network, but are much harder to acquire and retain.

An Example: Wikipedia

Let’s make this more tangible by using an example. Because just like Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, Wikipedia is a product that focuses on digital content, I am using Wikipedia as an example.

Did you know that Wikipedia consists of more than 55 million articles? And did you know that out of those hundreds of millions of users, there are only about 100,000 active contributors a month? And when you look at the small group of writers who make 100+ edits a month, it’s just about 4,000 people.

Those 4,000 people form the hard side.

Wikipedia is no exception. The metrics look similar for Uber, YouTube, and many other products.

Users on the hard side put in more effort into a networked product than regular users. As a consequence, they have more complex workflows and higher expectations regarding features. They will also try competitive products to compare your product against others.

These are the reasons the hard side is difficult to engage and retain.

What Can You Do?

Engaging the hard side works differently for B2B and B2C products. For my entire career, I have been involved with B2B products, so I will only speak about this product category.

At our scale, there is a very easy thing you can do to engage and retain the hard side: Talk to those people regularly. In this way, you will learn more about their workflows, their roadblocks, and their frustrations. By talking to them, you will learn what features they would like to see in your product. And by not just talking to one hard side user but to many, you will start to see patterns, helping you to prioritize your product roadmap.

Is it all that easy?

Yes and no. Yes, because talking to people is a good idea in almost any situation. No, because many people are still afraid to pick up the phone and talk to people.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were products such as Wikipedia, Uber, or YouTube. But somebody started at some point to take the hard side seriously. And most probably, this started with talking to the first few power users.

What are you waiting for? Go pick up the phone and call one of your power users.