Going Viral — The Right Way
Photo by Dushyant Kumar on Unsplash
Confession time: I don’t love marketing.
In fact, until very very recently, WLCM has done absolutely zero of it. No Google ads, no SEO, no email campaigns — nada. I’m not comfortable tooting any kind of horn. I prefer to let the work speak for itself.
A few days ago, I heard a podcast that spoke to my soul. In the podcast, Oji Udezue (Calendly, Atlassian, Twitter, Typeform) describes “virality” as “customer-augmented marketing.”
Basically, the product is so good and solves such a specific and substantial problem that users bug their friends and coworkers to start using it.
Everyone wants their product to go viral, but in trying to orchestrate that virality, they can lose focus on the main thing: The user and the product.
This is the hill I choose to die on!
Synthetic virality vs. sustainable virality
The concept of virality has earned a softly pejorative place in our cultural lexicon. “Going viral” feels cheap. Gimmicky.
If you think of a meme or a video going viral, you probably think of something goofy, novel — disposable, even. A cat doing the macarena. A room whose furniture is actually cake. A news story about a reported leprechaun sighting in Alabama.
Things that go viral tend to evaporate as quickly as they appear. Even apps.
The rise and fall of Clubhouse
“Clubhouse,” now that’s a name you haven’t heard in a long time.
Clubhouse kicked up a storm in March of 2020, just in time for the pandemic, as a social media app that lets users host and join audio conversations.
It reached a $100 million valuation in just two months, which swelled into the billions within a year. The hype was largely driven by its marketing, which created an air of exclusivity and FOMO.
While celebrities from Elon Musk and Tiffany Haddish made tantalizing appearances on the voice-based app, the rest of us normies had to wait for an invite to get access. Plus, the app was only available for the iPhone.
Yet, when I got my invite, I simply could not get any value out of the app. It did nothing to match me with content or other users who would have been relevant to me. It was as if the makers hadn’t really thought about the user experience beyond the point of getting access.
I backed out, deleted the app, and never thought twice about it.
Clubhouse had created “synthetic virality.” Some might call it a “hype train.”
I wasn’t the only one. Downloads dropped from 9.6 million in February of 2021 to less than a million the following month. You could argue that Clubhouse was perfect for the pandemic, and not so useful once we all escaped quarantine. But I suspect more money and attention was spent on the marketing than the app’s quality, and that ultimately led to its downfall.
Calendly, Venmo, Slack emerge victorious
Remember the beginning of the pandemic, when every business was scrambling to figure out its remote work tech stack? It was the wild wild west.
For every task, there were 10 apps to choose from. Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, Microsoft Teams for video calls. For calendar scheduling, Calendly, SavvyCal, Acuity, and others jockeyed for dominance.
I don’t have to tell you, Calendly took off. Now, it’s all anyone uses.
Similar story with Venmo, which won against Apple Pay Cash and the banking industry’s own P2P payment tool, Zelle. On paper, Zelle should be the clear winner here. There are no fees, transfer is instant, activity is private, and Zelle already lives within most people’s banking app.
But nobody says “Zelle me for that appetizer we split last night.”
Few apps reign so supreme as Slack, which relies almost completely on product-led growth. Granted, Microsoft Teams has used a more traditional sales strategy to outpace Slack, but the fact that a best-of-breed product can even compete with a suite offering from a titan like Microsoft says something about the merit of product-led growth.
I love dissecting apps that make it to the top of the heap, but the short version is always this: the winner simply did it better. They solved a specific problem in the simplest, most convenient way. The value is practically instant. They’re easy to use, the aesthetics are good, and they’re reliable.
My point: Virality comes from execution
From offering freebies like extra storage space to cultivating an atmosphere like Clubhouse, founders try all kinds of tactics to incentivize users to market their products. That’s all well and good. Launching an app is like launching a space shuttle. It takes an insane amount of force to get it off the ground.
But to inspire true, sustainable virality, you can’t lose sight of these truths.
The product must solve a real problem.
It isn’t the idea that wins, it’s the execution of that idea. Your product must solve it cleaner, easier, more delightfully than the dozens of other apps trying to win your users over.
Sooner or later, the better product will win out.
By definition, people love using apps that are exceptionally made.
You can call it whatever you want — virality, product-led growth, customer-augmented marketing, or simply good practice — but making something thoroughly, thoughtfully, and beautifully is non-negotiable.
How we build it better
Some people think of going viral as the holy grail of all marketing. There’s a mystery to it, and there always will be. It feels both random and clandestine, like winning the lottery. You simply can’t engineer it.
But your best bet is nailing product design and execution on the first iteration. Customers are hard to predict, but it’s unlikely that they’ll give you a second chance.
Frankly, most development companies out there care more about getting it done than getting it right. But you can’t make something beautiful, that has staying power, by cutting corners.
Those companies promising to build your MVP in just a few weeks at 85% lower costs? Snakeoil salesmen. They’ll drain your budget and leave you with a piece of junk hacked together by a factory of junior-level Chinese coders. A product built like that will be a hot mess express. It won’t make it off the runway.
To make product worthy of going viral, it takes a team who is hyper-obsessed with product design and UX, who cares about you and your vision and builds your product with its life after launch in mind.
