How To Acquire 250,000 Users…Without Spending Millions On Marketing
While we were drawing out the wireframes for PuzzleSnap, we knew our app should have a viral loop engineered within it. Apps such as Instagram, Draw Something, and SongPop were all super successful because they knew what a viral loop was and how to engineer it. We decided to not reinvent the wheel and follow what made these apps successful, while staying true to our concept. Building a viral loop was an essential part of our growth strategy since our company did not have a multi-million dollar marketing budget or expert PR/marketing gurus. The cool thing about building a viral loop is that when it does work, it is self-sustaining and far more effective then paying money to acquire users. So what exactly is a viral loop? The basic anatomy of a viral loop is as follows:
User(s) downloads app
They invite friends
Friends download app
They invite their friends
Rinse & Repeat
This loop can be applied to anything. Just change "download app" to "watch video", "listen to song", and "sign up for service", etc. Now unfortunately, building a loop like this is extremely hard. It's going to be 2013 soon and since everyone is trying to sell something these days, our society has grown pretty wise to product pushing. The way to get past this is to cater to a user's social graph. So what makes people "want" to invite their friends?
The product is awesome. (eg: Instagram)
The product requires them to invite friends to use it. (eg: Draw Something, SongPop, etc)
The product rewards the user if they invite their friends (eg: Dropbox)
The most effective solution would be a combination of all three. According to the Viral Loop by Adam Prenenberg, the following are characteristics of building something viral:
Web-based - The web is the only way to reach millions of people in a short amount of time.
Free - The user has absolutely nothing to lose if it's free.
Organizational technology - It needs to allow users to create their own content.
Simple concept - The user experience must be ridiculously easy to use.
Built-in virality - Users should spread the word out of self-interest
Fast adoption - It takes off without spending any $ on marketing
Exponential growth - Scaling up happens in a matter of days
Network effects - It gets more useful when more people join
Point of non-displacement - There comes a point where it's nearly impossible for it to be taken down by a rival (think Facebook & Myspace)
Ultimate saturation - Once it reaches it peak, it finally begins to slows down.
Once those characteristics are nailed down, we can utilize the viral model as explained in the screencast to forecast how fast something can grow. We were careful to ensure PuzzleSnap had all these characteristics while building it. Now we're just going to have to wait till we launch to see how fast we can grow! Hopefully we can hit that 250K mark! *Crossing fingers* ;)