How to Increase Product Virality by Escaping Network Saturation
Product virality is the dream of every growth startup.
You’ve had that meeting — where you brainstorm ideas for how to make your product go viral.
You prioritized your big list of tactics, and selected a few of the best to implement. But there’s a doubt in the back of your mind. Will these things actually make a difference?
The answer is probably not.
At best you will see a small incremental change in your viral coefficient. But unlikely something that can take you above that magical, exponential threshold, of K=1.
That said, I believe there is one remaining category of ideas that will fundamentally shift your approach to product virality. And you can find those ideas for every type of product.
I call the category: “Escaping Network Saturation”.
The Typical Product Virality Challenge
The truth is, the virality of your product is mostly determined by what your product is, and who the target audience is.
If your product is novel, mention-worthy, or makes sense to use in groups, you’ll likely see reasonable virality. If you’re lucky, your product lends itself to Demonstration Virality. If you see this home run in front of you, stop here and implement it!
However, if your product isn’t naturally viral, your job is harder. You can implement best practices like share buttons and referral email campaigns, but after a few experiments you’ll see diminishing returns.
More often than not, you will hit a ceiling — the limit of the natural propensity of your users to talk to other potential users about your product. Even if that’s relatively high, then eventually they have told all of their friends about your app, or all of their colleagues about your tool. This is called Network Saturation.
I’ve seen the key to improving virality is giving your users reasons, via product features or marketing campaigns, to talk about your product with a different group of people, and therefore helping you jump into unsaturated networks.
Moving between Personal and Work Networks
We like to think of products as B2C or B2B, and I find it helps to think of networks in the same way: personal networks and work networks.
I find ideas that help products jump between personal and work networks are overlooked. I think it’s underestimated how often topics of conversation overlap these two spheres. Let’s consider two examples:
1. You’re having lunch with your colleagues. You probably talk about your personal lives a bit, tell stories and have your phone out from time to time to show people things. It’s perfectly conceivable that you’d share, intentionally or not, an app that you use for recipes or an app you use to learn a language.
2. You’re at home having dinner with your family, or out having dinner with your friends. Very likely the first question is, “how was your day?” or “how’s work?”. There’s a window here, where they might mention what they were doing and that they used your product to do it. And in many cases, at least some of your friends or family will work in a job where the product could be relevant for them or a colleague too.
If you can be in those conversations, the potential is huge. Take the number of friends or family members each of your users have, and multiply that by how many colleagues they each have. And repeat. Even a low penetration tactic of this nature has massive potential reach.
If your product is not conversation-worthy, you might still be able shoehorn in a feature that can create the same connection — more on those below.
Finally, even if going from personal networks to/from work networks looks like an unlikely jump for your product, you can use the same theory to move from one personal network to another, or one work network to another.
Let’s look at some real examples of each case.
Network Jumping Examples
Personal to Work (big B2C opportunity)
Let’s take the example of a B2C app I worked on that help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
One of the biggest things you as an individual can do to reduce your CO2 emissions is change your pension to one that only makes “green” investments. To do this, we asked users to start a conversation in their workplace — they mentioned the app to colleagues and decision makers and the leap was made.
A good trick here, and generally with jumping into work networks, is directing your users towards the HR team. They are connectors of people, quite inclined to amplify ideas via big-broadcast communication, and often more willing to discuss topics that overlap with personal life. They can turbo-charge the personal to work leap.
Work to Personal (B2B challenge)
B2B product managers are so obsessed with their users’ “jobs-to-be-done” at work, that they probably don’t know much about their users’ personal lives.
However, it’s really likely that some of your users friends, for example people they studied with, work in a related industry.
Instagram might not be your first consideration for B2B products, but a follow or like there can catch the eye of friends. Equally, people add more friends than you would think on LinkedIn, so don’t overlook that channel for the same purpose.
Work to other Work (big B2B opportunity)
I’ll mention three solid approaches here.
The first is called “land and expand”, which means that you get one team or department in a big company using your product, and then they spread it to other teams.
The second is to target “movers” — people leaving one company for another. When people start a new job they are often inclined to talk about products they’ve used before, so this could be the perfect time to incentivize them with some sort of special offer. Similarly, people often talk to old colleagues about tools they use in their new role, so that could also be an opportunity.
Finally, there are communities of people that meet across companies to discuss their practice — for example in meetups or conferences. How could you encourage one of your users to demonstrate your product in that context?
Personal to other Personal
You can also apply land-and-expand to hobby organisations. Let’s take the example of an app for a sports team I worked on. The natural network was all the players on one team. But we built features that meant it made sense to add the coach of the team on the app. Then those coaches referred other coaches — in the same club or another club. And those coaches invited all the members of their team! In this way, the app spread quickly.
Another example would be jumping between families via schools. Parents and students talk to each other, and via siblings are very connected to wider networks.
Conclusions
It’s not easy to increase product virality, but hopefully this article has triggered some new ideas with high potential. If you think of something great that might also work for others, please add it in the comments!
I work with companies on product and growth experiments, and write about what I learn. You can follow along here: Timothy Daniell
