How to design a product that can grow itself 10x in year

Over the years I've used Unsplash images for countless projects and I've always wondered how it got to the size it did and how it evolved over time.

So it was nice to read this banger of a thread by @mikaelcho, co-founder of Unsplash talk about the product driven marketing approach they took.

Launches are good, systems are sustainable

My father often says that the 'harder I work, the luckier I get'. And I believe that's true.

But you often see the success of a company reduced to some kind of growth miracle where they made one good choice and everything just happened for them.

It's refreshing, then, to read this quote:

"Launch day, 30k people subscribed from a @newsycombinator post that went #1. That was lucky.  But hitting 300,000 subscribers in the months after with no product changes was not."

Launches are good but they'll only get you so far. I've seen Product Hunt launches and Hacker News launches that gave deadly traffic spikes but resulted in close to 0 conversions and retention.

This stuff matters for growth.

No strong organism (company or otherwise) was ever built by rapid and unsustainable blobs of growth.

A mantra to live by, I think.