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Brand and product simplicity, elegance of implementation. What is Dropbox's competitive advantage, or Instagram's?

Dropbox and Instagram both have much stronger network effects.

well, if Gumroad is first of its kind, or the biggest one, and will not turn out a rip-off, don't you think that people who recommend it would be a "network effect" ?

Network effect means that the more people use a service, the more useful it becomes. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

But there is the built-in marketing aspect since every user must send a lot of people around them to Gumroad in order to benefit from it.

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