In 2006 Facebook faced a huge problem affecting their ability to scale fast…

They were becoming one of the world’s most popular websites and weren’t ready to handle this kind of growth. Facebook required more software engineers in hurry to keep the wheels turning.

At the time Facebook were a band of just 20 engineers, and they saw themselves as the best programmers, who could one day rival Microsoft and Google.

They desperately needed reinforcements, but they couldn’t be mediocre just to fill empty seats.

As a small start up Facebook found it hard to attract the best talent, with Google and Microsoft well established and offering great packages and prospects for university graduates.

Facebook couldn’t financially match their competitors, so had to come up with a way to compete.

Facebook’s theory was that there were some brilliant programmers out there, who hadn’t found their way to Silicon Valley and were languishing in ordinary tech jobs.

Adam D’Angelo (Facebook CTO) came up with the idea of creating extremely hard programming puzzles and posting them on their website to attract these hidden programmers.

In 2008 Facebook’s puzzle page had about 2,000 fans, within a year it soared to 10,000 and by 2011 it had morphed to 40,000 members.

It became so easy, fast, and cheap to evaluate entries, that puzzle solving became Facebook’s most efficient way of recruiting new engineers.

Sometimes in business it best not to copy the way competitors do things, try, and find a new way, which makes you different and creates clear blue ocean between you and the competition.

Instead of competing with traditional suppliers and making customers buy their office technology solutions, we provide it for free, and only charge for the service in fixed monthly subscriptions.

…this created our clear blue ocean. Can you change things up to create clear blue ocean too?