I’ve had this theory kicking around in my mind since before this blog started, but since it wasn’t around then, I never posted it.

There are two types of “social” sites: those where one person naturally invites others (exosocial) and those where others are required for one to join (endosocial). Quite simply, an exosocial site attracts people as population grows, while an endosocial site attracts users only once a critical population is reached.

Why is this important? Well, an endosocial site (such as HireGeeks) requires heavy marketing as a catalyst, since no one will come until people are already there. Exosocial sites do not create such dependencies between a user and the rest of the population (though they might build one between two individual users), and are free to grow almost unchecked.

That’s why HireGeeks was a stupid shoestring business. Technically, that is some of the nicest Perl code I’ve ever written, but it means nothing if I can’t attract two separate groups of people to the site at the same time.