STEP 3

Turn 1 into 2 and 2 into 4—Going Viral

Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even.

—Jonah Berger

You’ve heard it in a million meetings. And clients are so flip about it: “We want to go viral. Make people share this online.”

Everyone wants it. As though massive viral sharing is as simple as asking for it.

The growth hacker has a response: Well, why should customers do that? Have we actually made it easy for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth talking about?

It’s stunning how rarely people venture to answer this question, myself included. They assume that “going viral”—benefiting from a rapid, contagious, person-to-person spread—is something that can magically happen to any product. But virality is not some accident.

Even when it seems accidental, it really isn’t. Take something like the Holstee Manifesto, an inspiring mission statement about following your dreams and living your passion, written by a small apparel company in Brooklyn. Because it was so much more than self-promotion, the short video graphic the owners designed went on to be seen more than 60 million times and was translated into dozens of languages.

Did the founders expect it to go viral and launch their company in front of many new customers? No, but because it was inspiring, moving, directed at a specific audience, and concise, it had a far better chance of doing so than the countless boring and meaningless mission statements written by other companies each and every day.

Only a specific type of product or business or piece of content will go viral—it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it. Until you have accomplished that, or until your client is doing something truly remarkable, it just isn’t going to happen.

Look, virality at its core is asking someone spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free. You’re saying: Post about me on Facebook. Tell your friends to watch my video. Invite your business contacts to use this service. The best way to get people to do this enormous favor for you? Make it seem like it isn’t a favor. Make it the kind of thing that is worth spreading and, of course, conducive to spreading.

It goes without saying why viral spread is critical to the growth hacker approach. Once you have decided that you will not be paying to get in front of every potential customer (via paid advertisements or publicity), then you’ve accepted you must reach them some other way. That means you’re relying on your users themselves to spread the word.

The crucial difference is that a growth hacker understands that this can’t be left to chance; we can’t wait and be pleasantly surprised like Holstee. Virality isn’t something that comes after the fact. Instead, the product must be inherently worth sharing—and then on top of that, you must facilitate and encourage the spreading you’d like to see by adding tools and campaigns that enable virality.

One of the simplest and most straightforward examples of this is Groupon and LivingSocial, the daily deal pioneers. Each and every deal on these sites—which at the time of launch felt a lot more exciting than they do now—is accompanied by an additional offer. For Groupon, it’s “Refer a friend” and you get $10 when your friend makes his or her first purchase. For LivingSocial, it says, “Get this deal for free”: if you buy the deal and recommend it to three friends who buy it via a special link, it’s free for you. No matter how much the deal costs.

This is drastically different from throwing some “Like this on Facebook” or “Post this on Twitter” buttons on the bottom of a blog post and expecting it to suddenly spread. Think about how much less Groupon and LivingSocial had to spend on advertising because every offer had advertising built into it—they were paying their users to do it for them.

Public-ity

Jonah Berger, a social scientist well-known for his studies of virality, explains that publicness is one of the most crucial factors in driving something’s spread. As he writes in his book Contagious, “Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.”13

This is why many start-ups owe their now-massive user bases to thoughtful integration with big platforms.

When the average Facebook user has over 150 friends, it’s incredibly powerful if they cross-post their Twitter posts on Facebook, say, or syndicate their Instagram photos.

Without question the massive growth and spread of Spotify, a music streaming service launched in the United States in 2011, was largely driven by its integration into Facebook. How many of us saw that our friends were listening to it and thought, “Hey, maybe I should try it, too”?

Now, Spotify had a secret weapon in the fact that Sean Parker was an investor in both Spotify and Facebook and was able to get a sweetheart deal. Most of us don’t have that kind of juice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make our products more public and get free advertising out of it. We can use other people’s networks to our advantage.

Dropbox, for instance, offered its customers a 150 megabyte storage bonus if they linked their Dropbox account to their Facebook or Twitter account.

Think of Hotmail, whose early attempts at growth hacking we looked at earlier. It turned every e-mail its users sent into a pitch to new customers. Think of Apple and BlackBerry, which turned their devices into advertising engines by adding “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my BlackBerry” to every message sent. (Apple’s best and most compelling public move, of course, was the decision to make its headphones white instead of black. Now the millions of people who’ve bought devices from Apple advertise them everywhere.)

Now start-ups are following this lead. Mailbox, an in-box organizer, adds a “Sent from Mailbox” line to the end of its users’ e-mails. When I filed my taxes this year with TurboTax, it asked me if I wanted to send out a prewritten tweet that said I’d gotten a refund by using its service. All of this is free branding—and that’s immensely powerful.

Remember, a growth hacker doesn’t think branding is worthless, just that it’s not worth the premium that traditional marketers pay for it. A growth hacker isn’t going to try to create brand awareness by buying product placement on national television or by paying a celebrity to be associated with your product. Instead, a growth hacker will look for ways to get this social currency for free.

Growth Hacking Your Virality

Dropbox’s founders, after pulling in their first set of users with their awesome demo video and social media strategy, had a choice. They could try to continue growing with the same tactics—more videos, more social media—or they could use advertising to boost their brand, because it was the conventional marketing wisdom. They tried the latter only to find that it cost between $233 and $388 in ad spend for every paying subscriber they brought in.14 After more than fourteen months of struggling to find a growth engine, the Dropbox team had what they call their “epiphany.” Using an idea brought on by talks with the famous growth hacker Sean Ellis, Dropbox built one of the most effective and most viral referral programs of the start-up world.

It was as simple as placing a little “Get free space button” on the front page of the service. The offer was that users would get 500 megabytes of free space for every friend they invited and got to sign up. Almost immediately, sign-ups increased by roughly 60 percent and stayed at level for months. With more than 2.8 million direct invites a month because of the program, it’s not hard to see why.

And remember, the alternative was paying upwards of $400 per person via advertising. You and I might not have studied math or computer science in school but we can do the math there. Referrals versus paid advertising is the kind of A/B test whose results are obvious to everyone. Referrals win. And today, 35 percent of Dropbox’s customers come to it via referral.

All of which is to say a simple truth that we try to deny too often: If you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product. There must be a reason to share it and the means to do so.

This is not easy. But once you begin to look at the world this way you can start to spot the opportunities. You’ll understand that you can’t just make a YouTube video about whatever you want and expect it to get 10 million views. There has to be a compelling reason for a community to take hold of it and pass it around. You can’t just expect your users to become evangelists of your product—you’ve got to provide the incentives and the platform for them to do so.

Virality is not an accident. It is engineered.

But we don’t simply set up viral features and hope they work. Keeping our growth engine going is a step unto itself. We must dive deeply into the analytics available to us and refine, refine, refine until we get maximum results.