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Virality

How to increase virality – Issue 64

👋 Hello, I’m

Lenny⁠

, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office.

Send me your questions⁠

and in return I’ll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice.

⁠

Q: Is it possible to increase the virality of my product? If so, how?

Before I answer your question, first, make sure you should be investing in virality.

⁠

You should only invest in virality if you are confident that virality will be your primary growth engine for your product. As opposed to (1) performance marketing, (2) content, or (3) sales.

As I’ve written about previously⁠

, most companies find the vast majority of their growth from just one of those four growth engines, and until you’ve scaled your core engine, time spent optimizing a secondary or tertiary engine is rarely time well spent.

How do you know if your product is well-suited for virality?

Here’s a simple heuristic that’ll tell you which of the four core growth engines to focus on:

Virality is a natural fit for your product if:

Your product is better with friends or colleagues (e.g. Snapchat, Slack)

The product is innately fun or rewarding to share (e.g. travel photos, homes for sale, incidents nearby)

Your product is remarkable — something worth remarking about.

Performance Marketing is a natural fit for your product if:

You generate revenue directly from new users (e.g. purchasing a product, subscribing to a service), which you can then use to fund more marketing

Customers are not naturally going to be looking for your product, and thus you have to come to them (e.g. a new DTC brand)

Content is a natural fit for your product if:

Your users naturally generate public content (e.g. reviews or answers to questions) when using your product, which you can use to attract new users

You have a lot of unique data (e.g. restaurants in Seattle, plumbers in Phoenix), which you can turn into rich auto-generated pages

Sales is a natural fit for your product:

Customers have high average order values and high LTV

Your product requires hand-holding to be successful with

If your product isn’t a natural fit for virality, you are likely better off doubling-down on the engine that is a more natural fit, especially early-on.

You can read more about this concept of “growth engines” in

a recent post I co-authored for Reforge⁠

and

this First Round piece⁠

What is “virality”, anyway?

Virality is simply growth that stems from your existing users. Each user brings in on average more than one additional user (directly or indirectly) and thus creates exponential growth.

To put it another way, the fuel for your future growth is existing users (vs. money, or content). Classic examples of products that grew primarily through virality are Facebook (inviting friends), Tinder (word-of-mouth), and Dropbox (incentives).

Virality of often measured by something called the “

K-factor⁠

” which is a fancy term for measuring the number of new users that each existing user drives:

i = number of invites sent by each customer

c = percent conversion of each invite

k = i * c

Note, there’s one additional implicit variable in this formula: the number of active users. Your active users are the fuel for the viral growth engine (i.e. they send the invites), which will become important when we look at increasing virality later.

What are the different types of virality?

When you think virality, you probably think about getting asked to invite your friends, like Snapchat. But the concept of virality is broader. Any mechanic that gets your existing users to bring in new users is a form of virality. There are three forms of virality, with 2-3 versions of each, for a total of seven types of virality:

1. Word-of-mouth virality: Hearing about it from friends or colleagues

Offline: While chatting with a friend or colleague (e.g. Airbnb)

Online: Seeing it mentioned on social media (e.g. Clubhouse)

2. Invitation virality: Being actively invited by friends or colleagues

Social/Collaboration: To connect with friends or colleague (e.g. WhatsApp, Figma)

Incentivized: Because one or both sides will benefit (e.g. Pinduoduo)

Utility: To accomplish something on-off with friends or colleague (e.g. Calendly)

3. Experiential virality: Seeing the product in action

Passively: Seeing the product as you go about your day (e.g. Citizen)

Actively: Being sent a piece of content from the product, which leads you to the product (e.g. TikTok)

⁠

How do you increase your product’s virality?

Now we get to the heart of your question: increasing your product’s virality. Thinking back to our formula above, you have three levers at your disposal:

Increasing sharing rate: More word-of-mouth, invitations, or experiential serendipity

Increasing conversion rate: Getting new users through your funnel at a higher rate

Increasing engaged users: Getting more users, and re-engage existing users

Of these three, the first bucket is the most interesting, so let’s focus there.

Strategy #1: Get your users to share your product more often

In order to get your users to share your product more often, I’ve found six distinct strategies:

Nurture organic word-of-mouth

Incentivize word-of-mouth and inviting

Make the product better when more friends or colleagues use it

Make the product *only* useful when using it with friends or colleagues

Generate content that users want to share with friends

Increase experiential serendipity

Let’s explore each of these tactics one-by-one.

1. Nurture organic word-of-mouth

Examples of word-of-mouth virality:

⁠

Tinder⁠

: Users tell their friends about Tinder after finding great single people on it

⁠

Airbnb⁠

: Guests share their travel stories/pictures, mention they stayed in an Airbnb

⁠

Zillow⁠

: Homeowners tell their homeowner friends that you can track the price of your home on the site for free

⁠

Clubhouse⁠

: Users

constantly posting⁠

about what they heard in a room

⁠

Levels⁠

: Customers

constantly posting⁠

about what they learned about their body

⁠

Zack Kanter @zackkanterA lot of people don’t realize that @Levels only says to put the CGM patch on the back of your upper arm because they’re in private beta - once it’s generally available, the recommended location is in the middle of the forehead so users can talk about it literally all of the time. November 24th 20205 Retweets269 Likes⁠

⁠

To optimize organic word-of-mouth virality:

Word-of-mouth is primarily driven by remarkable experiences (an experience worth remarking about), so start there.

How might you create a remarkable experience for your users?

How might you get non-users with a large following to experience your remarkable product? e.g. free accounts for influencers

How might you make your users feel special or high-status by showing off they have the product? e.g. waitlists, invites

How might you make it easier for your users to spread the word? e.g. share buttons, easy to find links

How might you simply ask people to spread the word? e.g. try adding copy to the product

2. Incentivize word-of-mouth and inviting

Examples of incentivized word-of-mouth and/or invites:

⁠

Pinduoduo⁠

: The more friends you invite, the higher the discount

⁠

Uber⁠

Lyft⁠

Airbnb⁠

: Free credits for referring new users

⁠

Robinhood⁠

: Move up the waitlist by inviting friends

⁠

Dropbox⁠

: Free storage space for you and your friend

⁠

PayPal⁠

: Free money for inviting new users

⁠

To optimize incentives virality:

People respond to incentives — what’s it in for them to spread the good word about your product?

How might you create a selfish incentive for users to bring in new users? e.g. free money, free storage

How might you create an altruistic incentive for users bringing in new users? e.g. save your friend money

How might you create FOMO which motivated users to send invites? e.g. a limited number of invites like Gmail, Clubhouse, Spotify, Superhuman, OnePlus

How might you increase an existing incentive? e.g. double your existing bonus

How might you surface your existing incentives more prominently? e.g. a large banner, more entry points

How might you make it easier for your users to know who to invite? e.g. import contact list, connect to Twitter to find friends

3. Make the product better when more friends or colleagues use it

Examples of products that are better with more friends/colleagues

⁠

Slack⁠

Figma⁠

Datadog⁠

: Colleagues invite colleagues to get work done

⁠

Snapchat⁠

WhatsApp⁠

Signal⁠

: Friends invite friends to communicate in this new way

⁠

Facebook⁠

LinkedIn⁠

Instagram⁠

: Friends invite friends to share content

⁠

Venmo⁠

Paypal⁠

Cash app⁠

: Friends invite friends to be able to send/get money

⁠

Reclaim⁠

Clockwise⁠

: Colleagues invite colleagues to optimize their calendars.

⁠

Airbnb⁠

: Allowing you to add guests to an itinerary so that they can all see the details.

⁠

To optimize product experience with friends/colleagues virality:

This is the most classic way to create viral growth and is hard to engineer after the fact. But there are certainly ways to optimize it.

How might you make the user’s life easier if their friends or colleagues were also using it? e.g. easier to share content, a secure communication channel

How might you make the user’s life more enjoyable if their friends or colleagues were also using it? e.g. fun way to share content

How might you remind the user about the benefits of their friends/colleagues being users? e.g. show missing friends/colleagues

How might you make it easier to invite friends? e.g. import contact list, collect to LDAP

How might you make it easier to figure out who to invite? e.g. smart sorting of potential friends

4. Make the product only useful when using it with friends or colleagues

Examples of products that are only useful with friends/colleagues

⁠

Calendly⁠

⁠

Zoom⁠

⁠

Google Hangouts⁠

⁠

DocuSign⁠

⁠

Clerky⁠

⁠

To optimize a multi-player product virality:

This includes products that are utilitarian, and is even harder to engineer after the fact. But it is worth thinking about this when you’re in the idea stage.

How might you make a single-player product multi-player?

How might you better promote your product to the receiving user?

How might you make it easier for new users to try out your product?

5. Generate content that users want to share with friends

Examples:

⁠

TikTok⁠

videos (with a watermark or link to TikTok)

⁠

Instagram⁠

photos, hosted on Instagram

⁠

YouTube⁠

videos, hosted on YouTube

⁠

Pinterest⁠

boards, hosted on Pinterest

⁠

Spotify Wrapped,⁠

pointing to Spotify

⁠

Reface⁠

, with a watermark

⁠

Airbnb⁠

listing, pointing to Airbnb

To optimize content-driven virality:

This form of virality comes from content generated through the product, which your users can’t help but share with their friends.

How might you enable your users to create remarkable content, e.g. TikTok creator tools

How might you create remarkable content for your users yourself, e.g. Spotify Wrapped

How might you make it easier to share the content you already have, e.g. share buttons,

Twitch clips⁠

, Spotify Wrapped adding a "share to Instagram Story" feature

How might you make it clearer where the content came from, e.g. adding a watermark or a link back

How might you make your content available publicly, e.g. FB making posts public by default

6. Increase experiential serendipity

Examples of products that grow through experiential serendipity:

⁠

Citizen⁠

: A notification comes up about something happening nearby, which you show your friends.

⁠

Hotmail⁠

iPhone⁠

Superhuman⁠

: A signature in the emails, e.g. “sent by iPhone“

⁠

Tinder⁠

: A match appears while you’re hanging out, and you ask your friends for their opinion.

⁠

Netflix⁠

: You and your friends watch a show together at someone’s house.

⁠

Uber⁠

Lyft⁠

: Sending your friends your ETA in-app, and Lyft pink mustaches.

⁠

Spotify⁠

: Sharing “What I'm listening to” to your Facebook feed

⁠

Dropbox⁠

: Making it easy to share a URL to a local file

⁠

To optimize experiential serendipity virality:

This form of virality is when people see the product in action during the normal course of events.

How might you publicly show that a friend or colleague is using the product? e.g. inline signature block, pink mustaches

How might you allow users to share interesting information from the app? e.g. their location

How might you send interesting push notifications during the day?

How might you make your product bring people together in the real world?

Strategy #2: Increase conversion rate

To explore increasing conversion of your invited potential users,

check out this previous post⁠

that dives deep into all of the ways to increase conversion.

What you want to focus on here is the funnel of a (1) mention or invite being sent —> (2) all the way to that receiving user sharing their own invite or mention.

⁠

Strategy #3: Increase engaged users

One final strategy for increasing viral growth is to increase the number of engaged users — users who in turn will bring in new users. You’re essentially putting more fuel on the fire.

Examples of increasing user engagement:

⁠

Facebook’s People You May Know⁠

, which increased the engagement of both users

⁠

Facebook letting you to tag friends in photos⁠

, which pulled those friends back into Facebook

⁠

TikTok duets feature⁠

, making it easier to create multi-player content

⁠

Venmo social feed⁠

, keeping users checking the app

Stories, across Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

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Virality

How to increase virality – Issue 64

Q: Is it possible to increase the virality of my product? If so, how?

How do you know if your product is well-suited for virality?

What is “virality”, anyway?

What are the different types of virality?

1. Word-of-mouth virality: Hearing about it from friends or colleagues

2. Invitation virality: Being actively invited by friends or colleagues

3. Experiential virality: Seeing the product in action

How do you increase your product’s virality?

Strategy #1: Get your users to share your product more often

1. Nurture organic word-of-mouth

2. Incentivize word-of-mouth and inviting

3. Make the product better when more friends or colleagues use it

4. Make the product *only* useful when using it with friends or colleagues

5. Generate content that users want to share with friends

6. Increase experiential serendipity

Strategy #2: Increase conversion rate

Strategy #3: Increase engaged users

4. Make the product only useful when using it with friends or colleagues