Hacking the viral loop

Hacking viral growth into your products is a path for growth. Understanding viral loops and optimizing them can fuel a lot more growth than any feature, advertisement or code optimization.

As an example, let me show you the growth rate of some of RockYou's "throw sheeps at your friends" Facebook applications:

The graph above shows that their Horoscope application gained 1.5 million users in under 15 days! How did they do this? By understanding and hacking their viral loop, here's a snippet from a Q&A with RockYou CEO:

The viral loop in most social networks revolves around a user posting a widget to their page and having friends see their page. The viral loops for Facebook (there are multiple) revolve around the news feed, the mini-feed and the invite request.

But Horoscope really took full advantage of the viral loop around the mini-feeds. We had no idea that the loop would allow for such rapid user acquisition.

Metrics for a viral loop (v = e*i)

Take from RockYou CEO's presentation on viral growth's:

To determine the viral growth factor following equation is used (it's the e=mc^2 of viral growth):

v = e*i, where
v is viral growth factor
e is the efficiency of the viral loop - y in the RockYou slide
i is the number of invites sent by a user - x in the RockYou slide

An example:

i = 5 (number of friends a user invites)
e = 25% (acceptance rate for invites)
viral factor = 5*0.25 = 1.25

1.25 viral factor means your viral loop almost guarantees self-replicating growth - which is a very nice property ;-) You can use the v = e*i equation to measure and evolve your viral loop.

How to get started

• Andrew Chen essay's on viral marketing, game design etc. He is the most proficient blogger on these subjects
• Viral loops of existing applications: A huge library of viral loops

I am in the process of mastering viral growth and I think it's a skill that should belong in any hacker's toolset. Hack on :)