Flywheel models how products keep improving and how it drives company growth. It's a way of showing how both the company and the customer benefit.
What Is Easy to Get Wrong?
No Causality
Putting together the flywheel starts with honesty. Do you really know what drives what? How do you know that? Is there causality or are you just drawing random arrows?
Non-Important Causality
Just because there's causality, doesn't mean it's core to what's driving your business.
Examples
Amazon
The most famous flywheel is probably the one scribbled down on a napkin by Jeff Bezos when he was starting Amazon.
Once you know the pieces that drive your startup's growth, you can focus solely on those pieces.
Note that within this context, it makes perfect sense for Amazon to also include third-party sellers in their marketplace. What otherwise would have seemed like a profit-killing decision, makes perfect sense within the context of this flywheel.
Uber
Again, this model shows how customers benefit (lower prices, faster pickups, more geo coverage), how drivers benefit (less driver downtime) and how Uber benefits (more demand, more drivers).
