📰 The Five Types of Virality

Sometimes it feels like people believe virality is just magic pixie dust that can be sprinkled on anything. Fortunately, it’s much more concrete than that. But to understand how virality works, you first have to know that not all virality is the same. Many successful companies have done distinct things to help make their products go viral, all in completely different ways. So I thought it would be helpful to try to classify the disparate approaches.

If you’re trying to build your company and grow your product, it helps to think as specifically as possible about how to get your product in front of people. You can engineer features that will amplify the chances that people will want to try it. Of course first, you have to make a great product that people love. Once they love it, they’ll talk about it more. But how do you actually feed them the language to talk about it and enhance that word of mouth experience? How do you remind them to talk about it when they’re having a great experience? Or later? You need to understand what’s inside your core users’ minds, and use that knowledge to help them share your product through whatever means makes the most sense.

Do you need to build incentive programs into your product and marketing plans? Or, if people are making something tangible and shareable with your product, like pictures, how do you get them to share it in a way that other people will be naturally exposed to the product? And then how do you make sure that the flow of interested people actually converts to new users as seamlessly as possible?

The most basic element common to all these different types virality is inception. The goal of all viral efforts is to insert (or “incept”) an idea of what a product can do into someone else’s head, and to get them so excited about it they want to try it and use it. That’s the most important component of any type of virality. What is that little sentence, that little hook, that little reason why somebody actually wants to try your product out?

So here’s what I’ve found are the five main types ways a product can do this. Do you have another way I didn’t cover here? I’d love to hear about it.

TikTok

There aren't many social networks now where you can get a lot of traffic for free. However, you can still hit the jackpot with TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, so I decided to give it a try too.

I asked my girlfriend to help me with this, because I don't spend as much time on social media as she does, and my awareness of trends and viral content isn’t very high. She quickly came up with a few ideas on how to create something trendy (spoiler: try to use trending sounds and jokes) that would also drive installs and, ideally, purchases.

The first videos we uploaded to TikTok easily got 600-700 views, thanks to TikTok’s algorithm favoring new content. This initial boost gave us motivation to keep going, and after 5 more attempts, one of the videos finally reached 2,700 views!

We tried to mix videos advertising the apps with regular content to avoid being shadowbanned or outright banned like on Reddit. After another 14 videos, we managed to create a video that clearly caused FOMO (yes, it's a screenshot with icons and captions). The video got 4,300 views and generated 50-80 installs for each app. Yes, it's not much, but what if the next video gets a million views? 😏

Our most successful video has almost 6,000 views and has generated nearly 100 installs for my new anti-procrastination app, StepAhead, in just one day! And it’s still getting new views.

Main advice here: besides trending sounds and memes, consistency is key! Don't give up if you only get 100-200 views. TikTok still works and rewards the bold and creative!

The first mistake most incumbents make when building new products in response to threatening new competitors is to attempt to win on features. To return to the phone example, Nokia and Microsoft tried to build something distinctly different from the iPhone, with a completely different user interface, features like Live Tiles, and various content hubs. The effort earned plenty of plaudits from the press and pundits eager for something new, but in practice made it far more difficult to secure the apps that actually mattered for becoming a viable platform.

A more pertinent example for this article is Google+. When Google launched their Facebook competitor in 2011 they touted features like Circles to organize your friends, Sparks to find content to share, and Hangouts to video chat. These made Google+ “better” and “differentiated”, which is another way of saying more complicated; meanwhile the most important feature — your friends — was nowhere to be found.

The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.

So good for Instagram: Snapchat’s Stories is a great product that has already gone through years of iterations; why, but for pride, would you build something different?

Still, cloning isn’t enough. The fact features don’t offer useful differentiation does not remove the need for differentiation: the key is figuring out what else can be leveraged. Google, for example, may have largely copied the iPhone’s UI, but the key to Android’s success was the search company’s ability to leverage their advertising-based business model to offer it for free. On the hardware side Samsung leveraged their manufacturing might and long-established distribution channels to dominate the otherwise undifferentiated Android market, at least for a time. And, in perhaps the most famous example of this strategy, Microsoft embraced web standards with Internet Explorer, extended their browser’s capabilities with features like ActiveX, eventually extinguishing the threat when Netscape couldn’t keep up.

I don’t remember much from high school literature classes, but one of the key frameworks I do remember is the different types of conflicts in storytelling. Now, the internet is confused over how many types of conflicts there are. Much like the 4P’s of Marketing are now 7, scholars are adding more types of conflict in storytelling over time. When I was taught this, however, there were three we focused on; whether the protagonist was fighting against:

natureanother personthemselves

Why am I talking about high school literature frameworks? Because every company has a conflict as well. The type of conflict a company is in will determine how you think about competition. I’ll describe these conflicts in more detail, how they apply to companies, and how to think about what to do in each situation.

Instead of making a list - I ask myself, what's the ONE highest impact thing I could do today.

Take note my friend. I said "impact" not "difficulty". Don't confuse the two. Sometimes the high impact thing is a 15 minute phone call. That's it.

And if I do my OBT, then whatever I do the rest of the day is gravy. I have zero-guilt once I've done my OBT. This simple daily productivity technique has made me WAY more productive, and way less stressed.

...b..bu...but what about ALL these things I need to do?

OK - even with an OBT, you sometimes have a bunch of stuff that you need to get to...eventually.

It's good to write those down, so you don't forget.

But not on a list.

Instead, use what I call - The Power Box

The common belief among family and friends is that effort equals progress.

Well, it depends.

In Managing chaos as a solo entrepreneur, Alex Adamov wrote that “People force themselves to do activities from which they do not derive intrinsic value.”

Nailed. Accurate. True.

I wasted countless hours on things that had little impact.

Think about staying on top of a network of relationships and processing hundreds of comments instead of putting that energy into creating valuable products.

Do engagement and growth metrics on X/Twitter really matter when it comes to building a business?

One thing is leveraging social media. Another is getting stuck in the “hamster wheel” of content creation. Day after day on the treadmill, enslaved to a consistent tweeting schedule, without much time left to achieve anything else.

Increasing efforts in the wrong direction may not be the answer.

Ha! Learned the hard way.