Let's just add in a little virality | Hacker News Reader

Let's just add in a little virality

redeye.firstround.com

31 pointsjkopelman11 comments

This is the single biggest change in how I filter ideas these days. Few years ago between two competing ideas, I would go with the "cooler" one(ie. one I liked more).

These days I start out thinking about any idea from the perspective of distribution. If I have an idea with no clear path of distribution(and revenue), it is an automatic no-go. I think a lot of Valley folks have learned this in past few years.

It can't be a coincidence that VCs in general are blogging more about sales: http://southeastvc.blogs.com/southeast_vc/2009/11/vcs-hear-i...

I think the genesis of this line of thought was actually Steve Blank's stuff, not VCs.

True in that Blank's been saying this for a while. But VCs only recently have started openly blogging/talking about distribution and sales openly.

peter thiel has said it before as well. if you don't have solid distribution and you are a consumer internet company your company is worth nothing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SRfBaKAiUM

at 2:37

Totally makes sense, especially having read the book PayPal Wars where the author--who led PayPal's marketing--talks of day to day strategies that helped PayPal acquire users consistently and cheaply.

Mint's founder on virality (paraphrased): his product had essentially no virality (no one shares their bank stories with their friends) so he focused instead on good old PR: making sure he'd be in the news as much as he could.

So much for virality :-)

Interestingly, just a couple days ago I was talking about Mint to my friends...

I think Josh's point was not that you needed virality. Virality is just one way to get distribution (albeit a very efficient way). Josh's point was that distribution (aka Customer Acquisition) is hard and you can't just 'bolt virality on' as an afterthought.

It's also worth noting that it can actually hurt your image if you try to bolt on virality when you don't know what you're doing. You can become a laughing stock. I'm reminded of recent failures by two of the largest engineering companies in the world.

Microsoft: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090917/windows-7-now-with...

Siemens: http://www.lc-d-825.com/

Ah yes, the Poochy the Rockin' Dawg theory of application development:

"Hmmm, add in a little more MVCness."

"OK, good, can you make it about 30% more AJAXy?"

"It needs more social networking, can you do that?"

"Now, how about adding in a pinch of virality?"

"What about crowd sourcing? Can you add more crowd sourcing?"

"Is there some way we can leverage synergies in the cloud?"

"Excellent, ship it!"

I'm really beginning to hate this terminology (virality). It just sounds retarded.

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