Virality
The 12 Rules of Virality I Learned Building a Video App That Blew Up
How We Turned Virality Into a Science
Published in
22 min readAug 29, 2019
Have you ever wondered how YouTube sold for $1.6 billion when it was barely a year old? How Instagram made it to $1 billion with just 12 employees? Because of virality.
This article explains the 12 rules of virality I discovered while working on viral apps — along with a scorecard to track your own efforts in going viral.
Imagine a coder in his apartment in Vietnam. During the day, he works as a remote engineer. At night, he makes games on mobile. Just for fun. He releases them on the app store and goes to the next one.
One day, he wakes up and he sees his game is taking off. Really taking off. In the space of 2 months in 2014, it gets downloaded by 50 million people— and then pulled off overnight because it was too much for its creator.
