How Stack Overflow achieved product growth by treating different people differently

If you are a programmer, you've visited Stack Overflow. It's a profitable company with more than 500 employees, dealing with millions of visits a week. If you have a question, it's probably already been answered on one of their forums,

Stack Overflow saves programmers time and effort, and it's also a passion project for thousands of volunteers who contribute content.

How did its founder Joel Spolsky make better happen?

In the early days of the 2000s, There was a programming forum called Expert Exchange. Their model was simple and obvious: They hosted answers to common programming questions, and you had to pay to read them. A subscription cost three hundred dollars per year.

In order to build the business, they came at it from a place of scarcity. The questions were free to read, but the answers cost money.

To get traffic, they tricked the primitive Google robots that search the web by showing them the answers (which got them good search engine traffic), but when people showed up they scram…