The other day Andrew Chen posted some notes from a CEO summit that I thought we all could benefit from. Clearly, the old way of acquiring customers is changing rapidly, if you do not understand this new medium, you had better start learning now.
How to get have sustained viral growth:
– Have a great product (ideally in communication or social content)
- Convert user growth ideas into Excel-based hypotheses and clear user funnels
- Build and track each step of your funnels
- Get an initial stream of traffic (Adwords is OK)
- Optimize until every user is bringing in a new user
Timeline: weeks to months
Getting scientific about user acquisition:
– Start with your laundry list of acquisition ideas
- SEO, tell a friend, Twitter, etc.
- Convert into 2-3 testable hypotheses
- “Buy users for $1, monetize at $5″
- “20% of registered users will import addressbooks, >5 of their friends will register”
Viral loops in SaaS/enterprise
- What things do people share? What tools do they use for communication?
- files, wikis, Outlook, Excel, USB keys, etc.
- These are your viral channels (vs Newsfeed/Notifications on Facebook)
- If your value prop can align with a channel, then you might make it viral
- Case studies: Yousendit, Dropbox, Wikis, Basecamp, etc.
How quick-hit viral loops work for consumer products
– Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”
- Quizzes: Social norms
- Top friends, eCards: Reciprocation
- 8 invites left: Scarcity
- But what’s the followup?
- Hide quoted text -
Value propositions for viral loops
– Best value prop is like Skype
- great for both parties (inviter and invitee)
- build deeply into the product (takes 2 to tango)
- Worst value prop is like lots of FB apps
- little to no value for the inviter/invitee
- lots of churn, feels spammy
- Sustainable viral growth is key for long-term value creation
Different acquisition models work for different kinds of businesses
– Vertical social networks -> SEO/SEM
- SaaS/enterprise -> SEO/SEM
- Consumer/communication/social content -> viral
- Themes, decorations for blogs/profiles -> widgets
Optimize your funnels by brainstorming levers
– Lets say you have funnel of Signup -> Download -> Install -> Fill out profile
- Lots of ways to improve
- change the order of steps
- remove steps
- combine steps
- use lightboxes, or longer pages, or progress bars, or lots of other UI tricks
- To optimize just the download-to-install step, you have dozens of options
- headline
- button placement
- “hero” photo or video
- target their OS
- size of download
- AIR
- small installer vs all-at-once
- installer filename
- etc.
Books and more resources
– Adam Penenberg, “Viral Loop”
- Robert Cialdini, “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion”
- Tim Ash, “Landing Page Optimization”
- David King and Siqi Chen, “Metrics for Social Games” (Slideshare)
(lots of other resources on Slideshare)
Source: Andrew Chen
