Virality Deep Dive

What is virality?

Virality is a phenomenon where a product or a system gains more users on account of its existing users promoting it while using it. Virality is user-generated growth. As the user base grows, so does the ability to grow it further. 

Once viral growth sets in, the growth curve crosses an inflection point and takes off non-linearly. As a result, the slope of the growth curve constantly increases while an offering is finding viral adoption. The ability to scale becomes a function of the current user base and hence keeps accelerating of its own accord, as the user base scales. 

The secret to viral growth is to rethink growth as a set of actions that users perform

Viral businesses implement growth within product usage; they leverage users to expose their offering to more users.

Why is virality important?

Virality is important because it enables a system to leverage its user base to gain exponential scale. 

Virality is user-generated scale. In a viral system, the more users come on board, the faster can new internet users come on board, till a market achieves saturation.  As the user base grows, so does the ability to grow it further.

As a result, the slope of the growth curve constantly increases while an offering is finding viral adoption. The ability to scale becomes a function of the current user base, and hence keeps accelerating of its own accord, as the user base scales. 

In a networked world, businesses no longer rely entirely on push marketing campaigns. Sustainable growth comes when users get involved.

Viral growth is the promise of the networked age and the only form of scale native to the network.

What are the benefits of going viral?

‘Going viral’ allows startups to scale user acquisition while constantly reducing user acquisition costs. 

Startups that ‘go viral’ demonstrate an ability to scale, which constantly increases.  As more internet users use the offering, the offering’s growth rate increases.

More pictures created and shared from Instagram expose Instagram to even more users.

As users create and send out surveys from SurveyMonkey, survey recipients get exposed to the platform and come on board to create their own surveys.

KickStarter’s project creators spread the word about KickStarter every time they promote their project.

All these offerings are designed to get greater exposure through usage and that is a common design pattern that we see repeated across scalable startups. As more users use the offering, it gets exposed to new audiences, leading to greater growth.

Virality vs. network effects

Network Effects and Virality are often confused in the online content world, possibly because the two often occur together and, in such cases, end up reinforcing each other.

Network effects and Virality are, however, completely different. 

Network Effects – A product with network effects gets more valuable as more users use it. They are achieved only after a certain critical mass is reached but can prove to be a very strong source of value and competitive advantage beyond that point.

Virality – A viral product is one whose rate of adoption increases with adoption. Within a certain limit, the product grows faster as more users adopt it. There are many products that exhibit virality without exhibiting network effects.

 The following graphic shows a quick overview of how these products stack up and should help clarify the difference between virality and network effects.

 In fact, there are many products that exhibit virality without exhibiting network effects. There are many others that exhibit network effects without exhibiting virality. 

Further reading: Virality vs network effects 

What causes virality? 

Virality derives its name from the viral spread of infections. Platforms like Pinterest and Tiktok grow virally, in a manner similar to the spread of infections through a population. Users ‘infect’ other users, while they themselves are ‘infected’ with the usage of a certain platform.

The design principles for unlocking internet virality lie in understanding contagion theory and the fundamental factors that lead to the spread of infections.

The mechanics of infection spread require four key elements operating in a cycle:

1.   The Host: An infected host sneezes and spreads the germs out in the air.
2.   Droplets: Sneezed droplets carry the germs that spread the infection.
3.   Air: Air acts as a medium to suspend and transfer these infected droplets.
4.   The Recipient: Someone breathes in these droplets and gets infected, in turn.

Subsequently, the recipient becomes the host and the cycle repeats.  

Removing even one of these elements from the mix can stop the spread of viral infections. Quarantining, for example, removes hosts. One could speculate, similarly, that sneezing in a vacuum may not have quite the same effect, owing to the lack of air as a transporting medium.

Virality framework: How does virality work? 

Viral growth works in a very similar manner. On revisiting the Instagram example, mentioned earlier in this section, the following four elements are observed: 

1. The Sender: A user on the platform sends out a message about the platform. 
2. The Core Unit: The message is typically the core value unit that the users create or consume on the platform. A user taking a picture (the core unit) on Instagram shares it on Facebook. 
3. The External Network: These units spread on an external network, connecting people. For Instagram’s growth, Facebook served as a very effective external network, enabling the spread of pictures (units) created on Instagram. 
4. The Recipient: Finally, a recipient on the external network interacts with the unit and is brought back to the original platform. At this point, the user from Facebook gets intrigued by the picture and visits Instagram to potentially create their own photo. 

The cycle repeats with The Recipient now acting as The Sender. 

This cycle, driving viral growth, is repeatedly observed across diverse start-ups. In a move that is now a part of start-up folklore, Airbnb reverse-engineered an integration with Craigslist that allowed hosts on Airbnb to post their listings (value units created on Airbnb) simultaneously on Craigslist.

Travelers on Craigslist (the external network, in this case) would see the listing and join Airbnb to make a booking. Over time, this integration, in combination with several other initiatives from Airbnb, created the repeatable cycle mentioned above, and led to Airbnb’s rapid growth early on. 

Further reading: What is the core value unit?

How do you make a product go viral?

Most viral acquisition is built around incentives. Users are incentivized either explicitly or implicitly (through product mechanics) to invite other users.

There are various forms of incentives that prompt users to invite other users based on the value that the user receives:

Network Value

Communication platforms (Skype) and platforms that are based on social connections (Facebook, LinkedIn) provide an incentive to connect with others through invites.

Turn-based games like DrawSomething allow users to invite friends because they get interesting opponents in the longer run but also get immediate gratification when the friend plays her turn.

Urgency

Groupon’s strategy to make the deal tip only after a minimum number of users buy it isn’t just about guaranteeing minimum footfalls to the merchant. In its early days, it was also about implicitly incentivizing users to get their friends over to make the deal tip. With time, of course, most deals started tipping, and there was less incentive for users to spread the word.

Interaction Value

Every platform has interactions and a currency for those interactions. By far, the most common way for platforms to incentivize virality is to provide users with more currency to engage in such interactions.

Groupon is a marketplace where the primary interaction is buying the deal. Groupon incentivizes users to invite friends by giving them the currency needed for these deals: Groupon credits.

PayPal offered $10 to every new person signing up. This, again, drove the invite acceptance rate very high and spurred its adoption.

In social games, players interact with other players using various equivalents of gaming power. These gaming networks typically incentivize users to invite others by providing them more gaming power to get better at those in-game interactions.

Single-Player Value

Platforms that work both in Single-Player mode, as well as Multiplayer mode, may give the user single-player incentives for inviting other users.

Dropbox incentivizes users to invite their friends by giving the user an extra 250MB of space for every accepted invitation. While the users also benefit from having friends on the service when they use it as a collaboration platform, the added incentive of extra space has helped drive virality.

Mutual Value

Users hate spamming friends. It was all fine to begin with when only a few services required them to send out invites, but as every new service asks for an invite to be sent out, users get more discerning. Dropbox, again, has a brilliant way around this by incentivizing not only the user but also the invitee when he signs up.

Micro-Celeb Value and Social Proof

If a platform helps a user to be creative and prompts her to share her creations, there is an additional emotional incentive to get the word out about the platform. This psychology may seem obvious in the case of, say, YouTube, which really got big when users started creating and putting up their video and getting the word around. DrawSomething is another service that grew virally by making it easy for its users to get creative. Instagram allowed users to instantly produce cool pictures using a (thus far) crappy camera and distribute them. In all these cases, virality was baked into the value proposition of the service. There was no need for artificial incentives to be layered on top of this to promote virality.

Of course, platforms may use a combination of the above strategies. Dropbox uses a combination of Network Value, Single-Player Value and Mutual Value to incentivize users. Groupon uses a combination of Immediate Value, Interaction Value and, to some extent, Mutual Value.

Further reading: Incentives to create viral growth

How can I increase my virality?

With a clear understanding of virality as mentioned above, it’s also important to better understand the factors that contribute to virality.

We look at two key factors below that drive organic virality. 

Incentives

Sender incentives need to be aligned with the core interaction on the platform. The more closely this action is aligned with the core interaction on the platform, the more likely is the platform to succeed with crafting the right sender incentives for achieving viral adoption.

A user uploading a video on YouTube is likely to be motivated by the potential for self-expression or self-promotion (or both) on that platform. The user benefits further by spreading the video on an external network, like Facebook.

Project creators on Kickstarter want their projects to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. This encourages them to spread the project page on their personal social networks. 

In a similar manner, survey creators on SurveyMonkey spread their surveys via email, blogs and social networks as this helps them get responses.

Teachers who create courses on SkillShare spread the message about their courses on their social networks to sell these courses to their followers.  

Aligning the content sharing act with the core interaction is the first key principle to building for viral adoption. 

Further reading:

Incentives to create viral growth

Getting incentives wrong – Social spamming

Zynga’s Fall And Facebook’s Evolution As A Viral Marketing Platform

Inherent Virality  

Word of mouth can work for any offering, irrespective of whether it is physical or digital, but viral adoption only occurs when the platform’s core value unit is inherently spreadable on an external network.  

When the founders of Hotmail inserted: “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail” at the bottom of every email generated on Hotmail, they were adopting a design choice that would be repeated across multiple viral platforms. Every email (core value unit) created on Hotmail would travel to users of other email providers and act as a demonstration of the free email value proposition that Hotmail championed.

Viral videos from YouTube embedded in Facebook feeds have accounted for the success of viral videos like Psy’s Gangnam Style, the many Harlem Shake videos and the ALS Ice Bucket challenge, to name a few.  

However, not all value units on all platforms are spreadable. A business exchange platform enabling exchange of proprietary documents may not have units that are spreadable. Users are unlikely to be interested in sharing confidential documents the way they would share photos on Instagram. 

B2B Software-as-a-service applications often show low virality, especially when the core use case involves confidential information. Accounting and invoicing applications are unlikely candidates for viral growth.

To unlock viral growth with such applications, we need to look for other spreadable units that are non-core to the actual use case but are likely to spread well. 

Mint.com is one of the best examples of this strategy. Mint is a personal finance application that integrates users’ financial accounts and serves them relevant analytics. The core use case around personal finance involves confidential information which users are unlikely to share.

To counter this, the company created an alternate spreadable unit. It gave early influencers special access to the app if they displayed a Mint “badge” on their blog or social media page. This helped Mint spread across the blogosphere with more than 500 blogs participating in the early days. 

Many other companies like Hubspot and Kissmetrics have used other forms of content as spreadable units. HubSpot launched Twitter Grader, a diagnostic tool that generates reports of Twitter influencers. It measures influence based on follower counts, usage frequency, and level of follower engagement. These reports helped educate potential Hubspot customers on better using social media for business.

Users would use Twitter Grader to calculate their influence scores. Twitter influencers started sharing people sharing their Twitter scores with their followers. This kickstarted a viral cycle with users checking their Twitter influence and sharing it with others. This content served as a spreadable value unit even when the original use case of Hubspot didn’t afford such spread. 

Hubspot and Mint.com present great examples of creating virality through complementary content when the core use case of your offering doesn’t involve viral spread. 

Core value units remain the most important, yet least understood, element of designing for viral adoption.  

Further reading: Inherent virality: How To Design Your Platform For Self- Expression

How is virality measured?

To measure virality, we need to measure two key factors: the viral coefficient and the viral cycle time. 

What is the virality rate or viral coefficient? 

Virality coefficient (or the virality rate) is the number of customers a single user converts and brings on board. A high value of the virality coefficient indicates one or more of (1) a high motivation of existing users to bring in other users, (2) a high likelihood of spread, or (3) a high conversion rate.

To calculate the virality coefficient

1. Identify the initial number of users, conversion rate to shares and number of shares by each user.
2. Calculate the viral coefficient as in the infographic here.
3. Determine the number of cycles required to reach the target user base.

The virality coefficient is the product of the number of shares, propensity to spread, and the average conversion rate. Hence some important measures to improve vitality coefficient are:

1. Number of shares by a user – This can be impacted by setting up the right incentives as mentioned earlier in this guide. Meaningful integrations with sharing platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp etc also have a positive impact on viral growth
2. High conversion rate – A provocative call to action (CTA) on the share helps increase conversion rates.

What is the viral cycle time?

Viral cycle time is the duration it takes for an existing user to convert a new user. A shorter cycle time period allows an increased number of cycles within a particular time frame to further improve the impact on customer growth. 

It is important to ensure that the number of steps between first exposure to shared content on an external network, and the start of a new cycle, is minimized. This ensures that users move from being recipients to initiators of a new cycle without much friction.

Chain emails are the best example of content going viral because the effort required to start a new cycle is minimal. Of course, the ominous footnotes foretelling death and other mishaps on a user who does not spread the word, definitely help start new cycles at an alarming rate.  

Sometimes, newly acquired users may start a new cycle instantly, as in the case of Instagram or WhatsApp. In other cases, users may need a few visits to the platform before they are nudged towards a new viral cycle.

Deep-dive on virality

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast… The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.”

– Paul Graham 

And a startup’s potential to achieve hyper-growth and rapid scale is best achieved through virality.

Our course on Virality unpacks the factors that led to the successful growth of today’s BigTech firms and hyper-growth startups.

Sign up for the Virality Masterclass

The ideas in this course were developed through deep research of a wide range of digital businesses and through actively implementing these design considerations with entrepreneurs building their start-ups.

This course aims to provide a toolkit and a set of design considerations, along with in-depth case studies, to help product managers and marketers plan out and execute towards similar non-linear growth.  

In the first Module, we explain the importance of viral growth. In Module two, we explore the common misconceptions that people have about viral loops and why these misconceptions prevent them from executing it well.

Module 3, starts exploring viral loops in detail, first by looking at the structure of disease spread and then applying it back to how digital businesses spread in a networked world.

The next 4 Modules and unpack this viral loop framework in further detail. In Modules 4 to 7, We study the design elements that constitute viral loops.

Module 8 focuses on the optimization decisions associated with viral loops. Module 9 takes a detour to explore the idea of Word of Mouth and leave out creative ways to engineer it.

Finally, in Module 10, we bring together the various elements of this framework to create a cohesive canvas that product managers and marketers can use to take decisions and execute towards viral growth.

Sign up for the Virality Masterclass