A Recipe of Viral Features Used by the Fastest Growing Startups

“Let’s put ‘share’ and ‘invite’ buttons wherever, and the product will spread like wildfire.”

This seems to be the popular belief about how to get products to go viral. Startup founders often confuse “viral” with “easy” and “viral growth” with “no strategy required.”

It’s true that virality is a great way to acquire new users for free and lower your customer acquisition costs. And, since free users are a great deal for any startup, it’s worth it to take advantage of viral opportunities. However, understanding the basics is important, so let me go through the most popular misconceptions first.

Virality is not a single feature. It’s a design principle. It’s not a result of good luck. It’s engineered. Forget about forcing users to use random share buttons. You must understand your audience and design a user flow that leads to sharing.

A funny cat video might go viral by chance, but not a software product. You have to put some thought into figuring out which features may work in certain situations. I hope my short step-by-step guide will inspire you to enhance your viral performance, but simply copy-pasting it won’t work. You’ll have to find out yourself what works best in your case.

What is the best strategy for building a viral product? Make people love it. Nobody would share an inferior product, right? So, create an awesome tool, and then your only role will be to slightly push users toward the share features.

Of course, some products have much higher viral potential. Collaboration and information-sharing-based startups benefit from the natural sharing during use of the products, which unveil their true value when used by others.

Skype wouldn’t work without other people, as you can’t talk to yourself (or at least you don’t need software for that). Facebook wouldn’t make any sense without your friends, as you don’t need to stay in touch with yourself.

Such products have the greatest viral coefficient (defined as the number of new users an existing user generates). This kind of natural sharing process is called “inherent virality.”

What should you do if your product can’t benefit from it? You have two options: introduce some collaboration or information-sharing mechanism to your product, or look for other opportunities.

I hope going through the following 8 steps will help you figure out how to increase your product’s viral performance.

Step 1: Understand Your Audience

The truth is that only engaged users share, so before drafting your viral strategy, make sure you can activate and engage users properly. Sharing starts with thoughts like: “I like it. I think John might like it, too.”

To get to that point, your user has to be sure that the product brings a lot of value. Remember, benefits of the product must be clear to the advertiser and to the one being invited. A complicated value proposition will spoil conversion.

Jason M. Lemkin states on Quora:

“For example, at EchoSign, it took an average of eight months for one paid customer to virally ‘create’ another paid customer. Over years, this compounds impressively, and EchoSign has seen fourth and even fifth generation viral customers.”

Sometimes it might take a very long time, but it always pays off.

As I mentioned previously, the strongest sharing motivation is satisfaction in knowing that “I helped John,” but you can increase the ante by making this process more rapid. Identify what your users want besides satisfaction: a cash reward? free credits for using the product? improving the subscription plan? fun features? VIP accounts? It also is crucial to identify who your users will recommend your product to.

All of this information will help you design your “Motivation -> Trigger -> Action -> Reward” user flow. Combining the right Motivation with the precious Reward is the key to success. Now, for sharing to occur, you only have to come up with efficient Triggers in the user flow.

Step 2: Integrate with Other Ecosystems Your Audience Uses

The most powerful Triggers are the ones that feel completely effortless, so you have to find ways to gain easy access to your users’ contacts. Asking someone to leave your app and manually send emails won’t work very well.

Therefore, other ecosystems are the best leverage for viral growth, as they’re full of potential leads. Integrate with mail systems, API’s (especially social networks), or phone apps to reach the next step, which is:

Step 3: Make Sharing Super-natural and Easy

Yesware and Rapportive are great examples of products that spread very well among target audiences. The value is there, so users refer to one another without any extra sharing features. It all happens through word of mouth, as they are integrated with Gmail. It takes exactly 2 seconds to write an email such as: “John, check Rapportive, it’s awesome.” That’s what I mean by super-natural. Extra sharing features won’t help much when you’re already in your email.

There’s also no share button in Hackpad. Sharing happens naturally when you want to show your documents to other people. Thanks to Facebook and Google integration, you don’t have to know the email of your potential collaborator. A drop-down list of contacts appears when you start typing, you pick the right one, and the document is shared.

Step 4: Leverage Your Presence in Existing Networks

Remember, you can’t force users to share activity via social networks or email. They have to do it on their own. But you can suggest sharing in the right moment of the user flow. Scoop.it allows you to share content to 8 other platforms automatically, and that’s exactly what you want – to gain more reach.

Auto-shares are very powerful, but you have to be sure they’re aligned with your users’ motivations. Spotify took advantage of Facebook OpenGraph and flooded newsfeeds and tickers with different music activities.

This strategy works because most of us have nothing against sharing music we listen to; however, it wouldn’t work with more private activities. Passive shares could go unnoticed, but, in addition, users can manually share tracks, albums, or artists, etc. Altogether, it’s a great mix of passive and active sharing.

Step 5: Let Users Refer Your Product

When sharing content and activities is not enough, you may want to experiment with referral programs. In this case, the quality of shares is much more important than their quantity. SPAM invitations don’t work anymore, so you have to be careful while introducing referral features.

You have to convey the message that users should issue fewer invitations and focus on those friends who would make a good match for your product. Offering benefits for both parties is the best way to make sure your users will be more engaged in the invitation process than simply clicking “invite all friends.”

As an example: Uber offers 10 bucks for every friend you invite (and you can invite up to 30 friends this way), and, according to available data, free rides are one of the most important growth drivers for Uber.

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