GitHub Growth Playbook
Social coding.
Acquired
$7.5B
Strategy
Network Effects
The Spark
Git was great but hard to use. Tom Preston-Werner wanted to make it easy to share code.
The Growth Engine
The 'Proof of Work' Social Graph: GitHub tacticaly engineered the first social network for code. The 'Fork' button and 'Contribution Graph' transformed a utility into a reputation system. By making the code-sharing process frictionless and highly visible, they created a powerful network effect: developers hosted code on GitHub because that's where the collaborators were, and collaborators came to GitHub because that's where the code lived. This made a GitHub profile the primary 'Resume' for the next generation of software engineers.