Use snowball effect in a sentence

The secret of Linux's success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball effect.

[From The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0, 24 Jul 1996 by Raymond, Eric S.]

It had a snowball effect, and I remember waking up one morning with over 4,000 messages to download.

[From Interviews (1998-2001) by Lebert, Marie]

"You know the snowball effect, though."
"Sure, start a snowball rolling downhill and it grows."

[From The Snowball Effect by MacLean, Katherine]

The snowball effect is a metaphor for compounding. 

Joe's wealth grew like snowball effect through time.

Investing in this type of business is the surest way to benefit from the snowball effect.

He wrote a short line of symbols on a blank page and turned the notebook around for me to inspect it. "Here's the formula for the snowball process. It's the basic general growth formula that covers everything."

Costly mistakes created a snowball effect, and in the end, it was too much to overcome.