Viral

Sep 12

How to shoot yourself on the foot, or how to kill your own viral product

Digerati Marketing is one of those seo blogs I like, and which are never updated

Anyway, this guy coded and published a program, called autostumble.

What it does, is that you simply remain logged in to stumble, and you have the program running in the background. The program coordinates all the clients, to stumble each other’s pages automatically.

Cute, fast, and brilliant.

But he killed the idea. How? By charging for it.

Sure, 10$-15$ are nothing, of course. But it kills the viral growth of the program. And due to the network effect, the program practically lives off its viral growth.

The network value of a product/service is equal to the number of clients to the power of 2. Meaning, 2 clients consist a value of 4 network, 4 clients consist a value of 16 network.

Its like fax, email, cellphones and instant messengers. If noone has it, its worthless. If many people have it, the value of the network grows exponentially, and after it hits a certain critical mass, no one can believe how they used to live without it. It’s hard to make it grow at first, and the growth is small. But after the critical mass is achieved, you got an unstoppable explosion engulfing everything around it.

For real machines or products, its hard to give it away for free, unless you are Sony or Nike. But for intangibles, like a software, its dumb not to give it away for free.

Do you believe ICQ or Messenger or Skype would ever gather the critical mass required to break the barriers of their network value, by not being free?

Don’t sweat on it, the answer is a big fat NO.

By charging for a service or product, that depends on its network value, even if its a trivial amount of money, you kill it right from the start. You are better off not starting the project alltogether.

“But how will I make money off it? I paid for development! I spent months on it! I paid for marketing!”

You can always find a way to make money out of something popular. ALWAYS. But work on making it popular first, then monetize it.

To stay on our example, a quick, dirty and fucking easy way to monetize the autostumble product is to make an image gallery (one that is already tried and appeals to the stumble audience) and put up a pay per impression banner. Then just add every page of that gallery to the autostumble queue, and voila, here is your money. No charges for the users, no obstacles for the virus to stumble on (pun intended), and the creator has some money on autopilot.

But nooooo, you just have to charge even a small amount of cash for it. Go ahead, kill the virus. Fail miserably. Who cares.