Design viral into your product

I attended an advisory board meeting for a friend’s stealth start-up last night and one of the topics of conversation was viral growth and how best to accomplish it. It was a good discussion about a lot of the most successful viral companies on the Web from Twitter to Facebook to social game developers like Zynga, and Playfish. But it also brought to mind what not to do and a point that I brought up is that there are right ways and wrong ways to achieve viral growth. The word “viral” by its very nature is negative – when is the last time you heard someone saw “Sweet, I got a virus”. The key point is that viral growth has to come from the product, and not from a marketing plan.

A great example of what not to do is Tagged, a social network based in San Francisco. Tagged took off like a rocket ship in 2006 and looked to be a high flyer until everyone realized how it was happening. Lots of companies allow you to import your email contacts to make it easier to invite your friends. Tagged took it a step further by automatically sending emails to all of your contacts when you imported your address book. Ex-girlfriends, business colleagues, friends you haven’t talked to in years, and your current boss all suddenly received Tagged invites. The result was incredible growth, but at a price. Tagged recently settled with the Attorney Generals in New York and Texas for spam issues. You could argue that the company has actually done okay since they were able to raise money on the quick growth, but the point is that it was definitely the wrong type of viral growth. The acquired users were not engaged and the service was definitely not sticky. The result was a large bell-shaped visitor graph.

Now, take Zynga as the antithesis to Tagged. Say what you will about the annoyance of Farmville and Cafe World, but over a 100 million players play Zynga games every month, and the company is reportedly on a revenue run rate of $250 million or more in 2009. The key was that Zynga embraced the social tools on Facebook to grow games at an incredible rate. One of those tools was the ability to get users to post items to their Facebook stream with incredible consistency. To do that, Zynga built social integration into their games. For instance, with Mafia Wars, users were encouraged to ask their Facebook friends for assistance on completing missions. Another example is the relative ease with which Zynga allows users to send gift to their friends that are actually playing the game. It sounds very elementary, but Zynga was one of the first to do it and it has allowed games like Texas Hold'em and Farmville to dominate the Facebook gaming landscape.

So while viral growth is really the goal of almost any consumer web company, the reality is that it starts long before the product is launched. It needs to be built into that product from day 1 of concept development. Otherwise, you'll be chasing the elusive viral growth after product launch which is extremely difficult to achieve at that point.