7. Engineer Virality

Product-Led Growth is best known as a way to design products that sell themselves. In other words, they are engineered to spread virally across your customer base.

The fundamental seed of virality is making a highly-recommendable product. This starts with solving a widespread sharp problem. It continues by making it uncommonly easy to discover, activate, and use your product.

For example, at Calendly, we spent nearly nothing on marketing due to the product’s viral nature. Every Calendly customer introduced and invited their colleagues to the platform.

Steps to Virality:

There are many ways to engineer virality. Here are a few fundamental characteristics of viral products:

Easy to get started

Make the purchasing journey as smooth and as streamlined as possible. Discovery, Activation, Conversion, Retention, and Churn reduction are mastered and refined by your team over time.

Psychologically safe pricing

Be generous with your pricing and the features you provide at each level. Customers will rave about the “insane deal” your software provides.

Remember: This doesn’t mean “cheap”. It means providing extraordinary value for the price.

Generous and competent customer support

Fanatical customer support is always remarkable and as such provides a boost to customer sentiment. Your support team must be lightning fast to respond. When customers ask for proration or refunds, be generous.

Easy to share

Viral software is easy to share in multiple ways.

First, it can often be used in teams.

Second, it can share its output socially, especially on social media, where it has a chance to go viral.

Third, it constantly invites customers who are not using it to use it - especially if it involves a 2-sided transaction (see Calendly).

Engineering network effects

Network effects occur when every new user to the product adds value to the existing users.

For example, the more people who have telephones, the more valuable it is to own a telephone.

In more modern terms, the more customers and consultants who use Coda, the more valuable it is to switch to Coda yourself (for sharing documents, finding support and templates, etc.)

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