The Difference Between Viral Products and Great Products

For a brief period of time I worked on building Facebook applications - it was like a mini gold rush. Everyone was building applications, fighting to get users and jump a few spots on the leaderboard of most used applications. People quickly began coming up with ways to make their applications “viral.”

Making an application viral wasn’t particularly hard. You had to come up with incentives for users to invite their friends. For example, to use a specific feature maybe someone had to invite 5 friends. Or maybe to earn 20 points they had to invite 10 friends. Whatever - the point is, you force people to invite their friends to use certain parts of the application.

This is a waste of time. This is forced virality - it is not good for developers or for users.

Users Want Genuine Recommendations

It didn’t take long for Facebook users to figure out that all these invitations they were getting weren’t “real.” They were a way for their friend to advance their own goals on a given application. This taught a lot of users to ignore invitations. If you constantly recommend things to your friends that aren’t genuinely interesting or unique, your friends stop taking you seriously.

You can’t tell your friends every movie you see is amazing or they’ll start to think your taste it movies isn’t trustworthy - the same goes for restaurants, hair salons, and even web applications.

Developers Need Genuine Recommendations

Developers need users to be genuinely interested in their applications. If they’re simply inviting friends to unlock a feature it’s a one time quick fix - once they see the feature it had better be amazing or they won’t be going through the trouble of inviting their buddies again.

If the application is genuinely useful or unique, you won’t need to force them to tell people. They’ll do it because they think it’s worth their time to let people know about something useful. They’ll do it because they want to be the one who found the application that changed the way their friends use the internet. If you don’t have that, your application will fizzle and die no matter how many people you force to join it because your active user count will be 0.

Having 100,000,000 users isn’t worth much if only 12 log in each day.

The Field of Dreams

If you build it, they will come. I don’t know how I worked Kevin Costner into a post that started out with Facebook. But he mowed down his corn field and built a baseball field for a bunch of old baseball players. Too bad Facebook developers aren’t deleting their useless applications and building things people actually want to play with. Does it take a mediocre actor to build something cool?

Is it harder to build something worth using? Yes. No shit. That’s the point - building unique and useful applications is going to take a lot of time, a lot of thought, and a lot of work. You can’t build it in a weekend. You can’t simply build a copycat application and “market it better.” It has to be genuinely good. It has to be viral by itself, without forcing it on users.

Give the users help to make it viral - give them the Digg buttons, make it easy to email friends the articles, and make sure they know how easy it is to submit an article to Yahoo Buzz. But don’t force them to do it in order to see a feature. Let them do it because it’s worth their time.