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Marketing is very slow relative to the world population. E.g. something like 20k users a day is huge from a absolute sense but slow at the millions/billions of users level.

Marketing is like watching a plant grow. The user base grows over years and years. This was actually surprising to me. I had a mental model in my mind where getting front page on reddit or something would max you out on all potential users.

Between marketing (actual users), development (potential users), and sysadmins (hosting) I felt like I was managing "streams of growth". Marketing always had to have room to grow so development had to keep pace. Hosting had to keep pace with usage.

You have to manage all 3 and make sure that each is not bottlenecked by the other. Locking one of them down would make management MUCH easier but affects the maximum growth rate.

E.g. I had 80M users with 26 years of work. That's really bad compared to say facebook/instagram/tiktok.

A good marketer is really amazing. Most of the time my marketer was just making components for marketing campaigns. In the game, once you create a campaign you just add/subtract money from it so the marketer doesn't have to do much.

I had 2 marketers at the end. I could probably have done with 1. They come in really handy for new websites since I had enough money to throw at expensive campaigns. I'd just use them once to create a high level campaign module like TV or podcast (vs lower level ones like ads)

My largest 40M users site was ranked 8 out of 11. I acquired 2 competitors. Valuations was half a billion dollars. The #1 was Friendbook with 2B users and an 18B valuation.