Ways to Build Virality into Your Product
medium.com"Your product offers a differentiated type of messaging and encourages users to invite their friends to join them on the new messaging platform." ... "That’s the limitation of this strategy: If the messaging experience isn’t actually better in-product than over SMS or email, users will just find it annoying."
What kind of "differentiation" are they thinking of? I would pay good money to not have to deal with any (more) proprietary chat systems. They're all annoying. "Download the app" and "Register here" are just synonyms for "Back" and "Mark as spam".
There's a couple tech giants whose chat systems I use, only because I've got friends and colleagues who use them. Unless your new chat system will get me a job, or is the only way 1/3 of my friends will send messages online, I'm not going to touch it.
I don't understand how we ended up with so many incompatible chat systems today. Did we learn nothing from SMTP? Is XMPP not good enough? Are we so petty that compatible communications are somehow an anathema?
Examples of differentiation:
- Signal end-to-end encryption
- Discord game integration
- Slack history keeping
- Skype ability to make phone calls
- Snapchat self destroying pictures
You may not see any use in any of these but some people do.
And some reasons why these aren't standardized:
- it is hard to do without some form of centralization (ex: history keeping)
- some services cost money (ex: phone calls)
- some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)
- owning a popular messaging network is simply too appealing
It's funny that you mention slack's edge as history keeping, which is a premium feature you need to pay for after a threshold... Skype and many others will always keep all of your history for free
> - some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)
I still don't buy that. If you do search client-side, then history should be trivially searchable even under E2E encryption.
I like the systematic breakdown. OP, what are some of your favorite viral marketing case studies?
Great article