Why most products never go viral, and what actually makes people recommend something to friends without being asked. The speaker explains that sustained viral growth is rare and depends almost entirely on spontaneous word-of-mouth.
My first one-on-one, I sat down with Elliot and I said, please teach me everything that you know about virality. And he said, hate to burst your bubble, but there is no such thing as a truly viral product. No app has sustained a viral factor of greater than one for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7. And he told me that lasted for perhaps a year. I double clicked again and I said, what about the address book import? This is one of the things that LinkedIn got famous or infamous for, you could import your address book and then it would spam slash invite everyone who happens to be members of LinkedIn in your address book. And he said, that's an amazing feature, but you have to remember not everyone is going to use it all the time. So even that feature had a lifetime viral factor of about 0.4, and that's considered good. So 0.4 is good for a viral feature, 0.6 is great. something like 0.7 is absolutely incredible. So I said, well, okay, all of these things by definition are going to peter out. That would be a little absurd if things just kept on growing. What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic that isn't in a feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product.
