WHAT IS VIRAL MARKETING? | My First Million Podcast
Michael Birch pioneered viral marketing by letting users invite all their contacts with one click. Birthday Alarm hit 50 million users this way with zero paid ads. A 1% activation rate times 326 average contacts creates exponential growth, though one SMS experiment accidentally cost $120k in Kazakhstan.
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So I've been on the other side of the— so, so when we were doing our Idea Lab, uh, I worked with this guy Michael Birch. Michael Birch was— is known as, if you just Google, he's like one of the top growth guys in the world. He sort of was doing and invented viral marketing before viral marketing was a word. Uh, he did it because he didn't have money back in the day. So he built one of the first address book importers where for this company called Birthday Alarm he had, he was like, and I think he did it before that at, um, Rick Marini's company.
I forget what that was called.
Birthday Alarm was before that. So, so Birthday Alarm was the first one where he was like, hey, I want people to send this to their friends. What if I just imported all the addresses from their Hotmail and then I made it easy, push this button to send it. And he's like, he, he literally told me at his house, he was like, I thought that 10 days later, like, I thought there's no way they let this go for more than 10 days. and he's like, it's now been 15 years and this thing still works. And he's like, so he was working on viral marketing cuz he just didn't have a budget. So he's like, I gotta use my customers to get me more customers.
And to explain that, you didn't explain it totally clear, but someone signs up for your thing and says, do you wanna invite your friends? Here's your Gmail contacts. Click select all and send an email to all of them.
And so in this case for Birthday Alarm, it was, I make a calendar where I'm, and I, I'll invite you. I'll say, hey Sam, can you add your birthday to my calendar? I, I don't wanna forget your birthday. This is before Facebook existed. By the way. And so you would add your birthday to my calendar, and they would say, hey Sam, don't you want to remember Sean's birthday? That'd be nice, like reciprocate. And you'd be like, yeah, sure. And then it would say, hey Sam, you got one birthday on the calendar, but you surely got more friends than one, so why don't you invite some other friends? Here, let me make it easy for you. Would you like to import all your friends from Hotmail? And you're like, yes. And then, and he added one thing at a time to make it more viral. So he, he would add, um, a pre-filled message because he's like, oh, there people are stopping because they can't think of what to say, right? So here's a pre-filled message that I know works. and then I just say send. And so then, he got this thing super viral, so, you know, Birthday Alarm grew to 50 million members with zero paid marketing. 50 million, and then he's done this again and again since then with his social network, Bebo, and others. So when I worked with them, the name of the game was viral growth, and so we did a charity campaign. They were trying to raise money for Charity: Water. Well, we made a story, a website that was just telling a story of this boy, John Bosco, with no water, and then we said, can we get this to go viral? So we did the same thing, import emails, get people to send the story to their friends, and raise money for the cause. And we got it to go viral. So I've literally been at where like nothing, nothing, nothing, you'd come into work, nothing, no growth, no growth, no growth, and you would just tweak the right thing, and then all of a sudden, you know, overnight something would have doubled. And the next morning, doubled again. Next morning, doubled again. And I remember it just going from zero to 5 million people signing up for this charity thing. Within like, you know, 2 weeks. It was insane. And so I've seen viral growth and how counterintuitive it is. Like, you don't think, you know, well, yesterday we had 4,000 people, so today we're gonna have, I don't know, 5,000, 6,000. It's like, no, you're gonna have 16,000, then you have 32,000, and it's gonna, you know, it's gonna go up to the millions within a few days. And so I've seen viral growth when you're talking about it in the good sense from a product perspective. Now it's viral growth of an actual fucking virus. And so, uh, and you can see actually in the US, somebody did a great graph where they mapped Italy, where everything's on lockdown because Italy has started spreading like crazy. And they showed Italy day 1, US day 1, Italy day 2, US day 2, number of cases. And the bar graphs are like identical. And the thing is, we're just in like whatever, day 6. And you can see by day 21 where this thing gets to if you don't like lock everything down right away. So I am very fearful because I've seen viral growth, I've seen viral spread, and I know that it doesn't work the way— it breaks our brains. Our brains think things go linearly, but this goes exponentially, and it's really hard to just comprehend an exponential spread.
And to take the story a different way than coronavirus, which is that stuff that you're describing, that Michael Burj thing, you can actually still get all these cool plugins that auto— automatically like allow people to share a pre-populated message to all their Gmail contacts. We used it and people still share.
Yeah. And the, the, the math works out where, you know, um, cuz you would think I would never do that. I wouldn't email all my contacts.
No, we had a lot of people doing it, but people do it.
And what happens is, you know, 1% or less will do it. But you look at the math, 1% of people do it on an average, they have 326 contacts. So for every 100 people that come in, you get 326 people blasted out.
It doesn't work as good as that time because the email open rates are much higher then.
Yeah. But now people are like, oh, I don't know. I never talked to Sam. So if he's sending me this, this is junk, this is spam. Now people filter it. But in certain countries it works. Like we were growing, like we could do this like clockwork in India. In India, people still open it like they did in the US 10 years ago and they forward even higher rates. They don't care. They'll forward everything to everybody. And so India, Turkey, all these little countries where we, would see this crazy growth that you couldn't get in the US and/or UK anymore. They kind of suck because the monetary value ends up, you know, the value per user is lower there, but it does still feel good to get like—
and it definitely works and people are shocked by that.
Yeah, we did one through SMS, I remember, and over the weekend it went viral. And like, you know, during the week, Monday through Friday, everything looks fine, is growing, but like not at a crazy pace. We didn't realize the viral coefficient was 2. And so over the weekend it took off and started compounding on a big number. And we racked up $120,000 in SMS, $120,000 bill in SMS.
Holy crap.
Going through Kazakhstan. It's like we didn't even know we were growing. We're going to grow in Kazakhstan. And it went crazy. And turns out texting in Kazakhstan, super expensive. And so $120,000 in 2 days we had to pay off.
That's crazy.
Sucked. Well,
