Last edition we learned where the best ideas in the world come from.

But there’s another mystery about great ideas that puzzled social scientists throughout the 20th century: once you bring a great idea to life (one that will become a big hit), you may be surprised to find that everyone just shrugs it off or rejects it.

For example, in 1933 the US state of Iowa was facing widespread famine. Fifty percent of every year's harvest was going to waste because decades of bad farming practices had weakened the state’s crops. To make matters worse, the Dust Bowl that was causing drought conditions across the Midwest was now barreling towards The Corn State, meaning disaster was literally on the horizon for Iowa’s population. 

But then hope arrived draped in white lab coats. 

American scientists had spent the past decade developing “hybrid corn,” a seed that produced healthy corn crops that were easy to harvest and could thrive even in the looming drought conditions. It was literally the answer to Iowa’s prayers. But after a year of expensive educational and sales campaigns, 70% of Iowa’s farmers knew about hybrid corn and yet less than 1% had adopted it! “A man doesn’t just try anything new right away,” one farmer reasoned.

Here was a market with a life and death problem, presented with a miraculous solution, and yet it responded with resounding rejection. As insane as this example seems, it is by no means an outlier. We see this effect play out with great ideas in every field and throughout time.

• A 2007 survey of 1300 U.S. cell phone users found that only 6% planned on buying an iPhone and 67% said there was zero chance they’d consider buying. The product was widely mocked and derided by journalists and tech execs at Blackberry, Motorola, Microsoft, and beyond.

• One of the music industry’s greatest ideas, The Beatles, was rejected by Dick Rowe at Decca records after their audition in 1962—during which they performed several songs that would top charts in the coming years.

• Disney’s first blockbuster Mickey Mouse film was dismissed by every single distributor that watched it. 

Even if you create something truly great, don’t think for one second the world will embrace it with open arms.

Figuring out how to get traction behind a truly great idea can be a maddening process. Scientists have experienced just as much frustration while researching this subject. Hundreds of studies throughout the 1900s failed to confirm a working theory about how the best innovations spread.

One thing that we have known for a long time is that the vast majority of successful ideas including bestselling books, chart-topping apps, and mainstream political movements, tend to grow through word of mouth. If you want your new podcast, side hustle, or conspiracy theory to take off then you’ll need some humans to recommend your idea to other humans at an increasingly faster rate. 

But here’s where things get weird: we don’t accept every recommendation we get. Only some recommendations drive adoption and studies long struggled to find any rhyme or reason behind which ones will work. A famous influencer with millions of followers can recommend a product and drive little to no sales even when multiple scientific models predict the campaign should succeed. 

So you can imagine my excitement last week when I stumbled across a set of studies published over the past few years that seem to have cracked the code on how to make great ideas spread. These studies compile about two decades of recent network research to reveal insights including: 

1. The path that great ideas follow to gain widespread adoption, 

2. How to find the perfect early adopters for your idea, and

3. How to convince them to embrace it.

Today we’ll tackle that first subject—the path by which great ideas spread—and we’ll follow up with further insights in coming editions.

By the end you’ll have everything you need to make your next big idea the talk of the town…

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and the study that revealed what successful founders, scientists, and terrorists, have in common.

The perfect case study for understanding our new scientific revelations is the strange spread of Airbnb.

In November 2008, the founders were close to shutting the company down.

They’d been grinding since the start of the year but couldn’t seem to break past $200 in weekly revenue. They’d already maxed out as many credit cards as possible and every investor they pitched said something along the lines of “no-frickin-way” (one investor just randomly walked out of the pitch without saying a word, never to return!).

The most depressing part was that Airbnb was a national news sensation just two months prior. It was Presidential election season and the founders went viral after creating “Obama O’s” and “Cap'n McCain’s” cereal boxes. CNN picked up the story and they became the #1 political video of the day, garnering millions of eyeballs. It was the kind of marketing exposure that anyone with a big idea dreams of. Yet fast forward one week later and Airbnb was a ghost town!

How is it possible that national news coverage translated into zero sustainable growth? And who could blame the founders for wanting to give up at this point? After all, if you can’t succeed after going viral then surely nothing else will work? This was the exact same puzzle that had perplexed generations of scientists.

But the founders would stumble across the missing piece two months later, after joining the startup accelerator, Y Combinator. At first, the panel rejected them just as every other investor had, but when Paul Graham (founder of YC) spotted the cereal boxes, he decided to give them a chance out of pure respect for the hustle. 

Their first clue to solving the adoption mystery was a piece of advice from the engineer who created Gmail: “It is better to have 100 users that love you,” he counseled them, “than 1000 users who like you.” The next clue came during a pivotal conversation…

“Where are your users?” Paul Graham asked the founders.

“Everywhere,” the founders responded.

“Where are your MOST users?” Graham pushed back.

“New York,” they replied.

“Go meet ALL of your users in New York,” Graham instructed them.

It was about as mysterious as Mr Miyogi’s “wax on, wax off” directive in the Karate Kid but off to New York they flew.

As the founders met with the city’s hosts, they noticed all kinds of problems with the listings. The photos didn’t do the apartments justice. The written descriptions were short and uninspiring. The prices were too high. So the founders hired professional photographers, rewrote the descriptions themselves, and suggested better pricing. But perhaps the most important thing they did was invite the city’s hosts to go for a beer with them, ten at a time. “We’d build a relationship, build a rapport, tell them our story, [and] try to make them into our evangelists,” cofounder Nathan Blecharczyk recalls.

The founders didn’t get “100 users that love you” like the Gmail engineer suggested—because they only had 20-30 hosts in New York at the time—but that would turn out to be more than enough. 

As Blecharczyk recounted four years later in 2013, “It was at this point that guests from around the world started booking these properties in New York. As the hosts started making money, they would tell their friends, their friends would come to the site, see the really high bar that was established, and then they would emulate that.”

Their trip had somehow turned New York into the thriving Airbnb capital of the world. Tourists would then return to their home countries and become hosts themselves, slowly creating new Airbnb hubs. 

“Properties were popping up in Berlin, Barcelona, Hong Kong, all over the world,” Blecharczyk remembers, “and suddenly you had a lot more places you could go to. And today it’s exploded. There’s 600,000 properties in 192 counties, 40,000 different cities, literally everywhere.”

How did going for a beer with two dozen New York hosts do more to spark a global revolution than national media coverage?

As a scientific review published in Nature Communications in December 2024 observed, “the key insight lies in the fundamental distinction between simple and complex contagions.” 

A simple idea/contagion like “news, Twitter hashtags, and memes” can spread rapidly because “a single exposure to an agent can be sufficient for transmission to occur.” In other words, if you’re going to share a simple idea, you generally only need to see it once before you engage. It’s not like you need to see the same news story or tweet multiple times before you decide to share it. This makes influencers with large broadcast reach the perfect candidates to spread simple ideas.

But Airbnb is not a simple idea. 

Staying in a stranger’s house is a risky behavior that defied the social norms of the day. Airbnb is what researchers have now come to understand as a “complex contagion.” Complex contagions are ideas that “require individuals to make a substantial personal investment due to the costs or risks involved, including reputational or social risks (e.g., the risk of being alienated by a social circle for adopting a political position), personal risks (e.g., in social protests), and personal effort.”

If your idea requires effort or risk to engage in—it’s a complex contagion. 

New ideas like products, fashion trends, and movies, ask us to invest some combination of our effort, money, and time, and so this means that a single recommendation is rarely enough for us to engage. “By contrast,” the review continues, “complex contagions require social reinforcement: an individual must have multiple exposures to an idea or a behavior to adopt it.”

This is the key insight: multiple exposure. 

One of the biggest factors that predicts whether someone will adopt a complex contagion is the percentage of people in their network who have also adopted and recommended it. The vast majority of us are more likely to watch a new TV series based on the recommendation of half of our friendship group than we are from the recommendation of a lone influencer, even if they are famous.

This is why Iowa’s farmers rejected hybrid corn. It was a risky new idea that they were reluctant to embrace after only a single visit from a scientist or a salesperson, while at the same time no other farmers in their network were using it or recommending it. We embrace complex contagions based on norms, not knowledge. 

Armed with this understanding, scientists have been able to pinpoint the exact network structures that are optimal for spreading complex contagions.

They call them “wide bridges.”

A wide bridge is where you have multiple points of interaction with a complex contagion—you hear about it from several different contacts. The more contacts who recommend something, the wider the bridge.

But it’s important to remember that the width of a bridge is relative. If your social circle consists of five people then three recommendations will feel much more significant (3/5 = 60%) than if your social circle has 100 people in it (3/100 = 3%).

So where do you find wide, dense bridges?

Answer: inside of tight-knit communities.

Members of a narrow community have a large number of overlapping mutual connections. If you can convince even a small subsection of a narrow community to adopt your idea, whether it’s an office, an online forum, or a pickleball society, then a magical cascade can unfold. 

As your small subsection pings other members multiple times about the new idea, they gradually convert each member until they take over the whole group. From there the idea must be seeded inside of another narrow community, and then another, until it eventually spreads throughout the wider population.

This is why so many ideas with mass appeal started in laughably small places.

A book that spread like wildfire, Fifty Shades of Grey, started as Twilight fan fiction on a niche subsection of the FanFiction.net forum. The author exploited the site’s functionality to generate multiple exposures by breaking the book into 110 chapters, publishing one at a time. As one original community member explains, “a lot of people actually reviewed that f***** thing ONE HUNDRED AND TEN times. So even if she had only 100 super loyal readers, that's 11,000 reviews (think upvotes). People see a story with 11,000 reviews and want to click it to see what all the fuss is about.”

Once the author was ready to publish, she leveraged her narrow community as a launching pad: “She then leveraged the community's sense of nostalgia and loyalty, urging everyone to buy the book and give it good ratings, so as to see 'one of their own succeed in the publishing world'. There were multiple campaigns from her friends (tens of thousands of what she only saw herself as 'fans') to blast her Amazon page and send the book up the ranks. It of course worked.”

Or consider how modern credit card payments started with the “Diners Club” card in the 1950s, an idea seeded initially with only New York's most elite businessmen. After 28 upscale restaurants and two hotels in the city signed on to accept monthly billing, the program was able to scale to 10,000 members in its first year.

And this is also why Airbnb’s New York trip was so successful. They created a community of wide bridges in one place where members could be exposed to multiple recommendations. This is what finally created the tipping point that broke the social norm that New Yorkers held around staying with strangers.

The advice to start by targeting a small niche can come across as annoying and confusing at first. After all, if we’ve produced a great idea, thousands, millions or even billions may come to embrace it. But when you understand the underlying mechanisms by which complex contagions spread, it’s much easier to understand why you’re almost always better off picking one specific place to start seeding your idea—somewhere your idea can be recommended to others by multiple different group members. 

The next problem you will run into is that not all communities will be willing to embrace your idea. You need to pick the best one to target.

How do you do that?

This is the question we will explore in the next installment. I tracked down an agricultural bulletin report from the 1950s that reveals how hybrid corn finally spread among Iowa’s farmers and it (among other insightful sources) sheds some light on finding the right people to focus on!

Note: in addition to the studies referenced, the above content was also inspired by the book “Change: How to Make Big Things Happen” by Professor Damon Centola who has been one of the largest contributors to the field of network science. Highly recommended as further reading.

(P.s., How do you feel about more in depth posts like this one? Would love to hear feedback in the poll below—we read and take to heart every response)

Final Calls To Action

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