You CAN make your product go viral.

Till almost a couple of decades back, viral products didn’t exist in our world.

Because most products were made out of actual, physical material. So they naturally cost a lot of money and took a lot of time to make.

Have you, for example, ever seen a viral chair? – a chair that infects other chairs and makes it like itself? Gradually, but surely, converting all chairs in the world to may be, burgundy-colored, scientology-believing chairs?

No, right?

But, software can do that. The big advantage of software is that making the first specimen costs time and effort, but not the copies. Hence, computer viruses. Viruses happen because of this property of easy replicability and not merely because of the evil people that write them.

They still need a robust medium though. The early ones spread through floppy discs. Still, If you found that your disk was infected you had the option of just throwing it away, or burning it or performing some ritual on it.

Not so with the internet though. The Internet made it worse. As the medium of distribution became more ubiquitous, partially helped along by the infamous, Internet Explorer browser, viruses really became a everyday occurrence.  Internet explorer by the way, should, even now, be avoided like the Ebola virus.

Continuing, while viruses are not very desirable as a lifestyle choice for most people, viral applications are, for the most part ok and as you will see, unavoidable. These are things like Facebook, Hotmail, Paypal, Twitter etc.

Whether we are talking about scientologist chairs, or annoying viruses or apps like Facebook, it’s the same principle at heart.

Your viral-coefficient has to be greater than 1.

Now, for most people, figuring out time-travel is easier than making a viral app with a co-efficient greater than one.

Not for the viewers of this video though.

So let me show you how you can go about building the next viral sensation in your garage.

Fundamentally, a viral co-efficient greater than one means that somehow, on average, every person who uses your app ends up bringing in one additional person plus a little bit more.

That will make it go viral, I promise.

It also matters how fast someone can “infect” – or bring in another person. For a really viral app this will be under 24 hours. The faster this average time taken, the “worse” the viral infection.

This suggests that I can make a few adjustments to my app to make sure people invite a lot of people and to do it fast enough and to do it convincingly enough. Dropbox is a beautiful example – for every one person who signs up you get 250 mb free from drop box and so will that person.

Lets now go to a subtler, more evil, level…

What makes people reach out and bring people in? What are the motivators? The internal drives? This is where we put humanity on the proverbial couch.

Turns out virality happens because humans are fundamentally quite weird. I would call them stupid in fact, if I didn’t realize I was one of them.

In an ideal world, things should go viral because they have practical value. Not so in the weird human world.

Apart from practical value, it turns out social currency, triggers, emotion, being seen in public, and stories are some of the things that makes us dance and make Aristotle turn in his grave.

Social currency is our need for approval, for status, for being in an exclusive club. Google’s Gmail, when it was launched, used this to wonderful effect with the “invite your friend to gmail” story. Boy, did people feel special during that time.

It turns out we need triggers to bring us back to an app, otherwise we simply forget that it ever existed. A good app has a lot of triggers whether the users like it or not. Every time someone tags you in a picture, it acts as a trigger making you rush in a panic to your facebook feed to see what picture it was. If this trigger can happen every day, that is a plus level of evil.

Also, we respond to emotion more than facts. Fear, anger being one of the most potent ones for the precious and sought after “word of mouth”. That’s why newspapers are filled with bad, scary news narrated furiously by reporters with prematurely greying hair. It’s Fear that they are selling dear, not news.

Suppose you come across a couple of people playing chess on a bench in a park, and there is also a football match going on – which game are most people likely to watch? The football game of course, since it is simple more visible.

Stories.

Stories have tremendous carrying power and recall value. That’s why movies are more watchable than documentaries. The story element is very clear.

To sum up, You need to have people using your app get one additional user plus a little bit more on average. And, they will need to do that fast.

The typical reasons humans do this is, apart from practical value for social currency, or in response to triggers, or for emotion, or when seen in public, or when there is a memorable story to tell

Now that I have told you all this, I wish there was some way I could look into in your eyes right now and photograph the birth of pure evil.

May you NOT make a viral app.

Stay well.