[ryandrake]

"Do the exact opposite. Don’t spend money acquiring users, instead build your product to go viral, and then monetize through selling access to users (and their data) to advertisers."

This idea that viral=free is pretty dangerous. "Viral" can be a very expensive way to acquire customers. Who develops these viral features? free developers? Who tests them, deploys them, scales systems to handle viral growth? Viral is only free if you aren't paying your development, testing, and ops staff.

[pytrin]

You're going to pay for those anyway if you are growing. The point is that those are fixed costs and not costs per costumer.

[AJ007]

Viral is single word which describes a business which grows at the rate of just over 1 for every new customer added.

It just means that its something that is good enough, enjoyable enough, or odd enough that someone who sees it tells other people they should see it too.

When your product is not viral, it means for customers don't tell other people to use your product. Or, they do, but the referrals can't figure out how to sign up, make sense of your value proposition, etc.

Markets exist for customer acquisition. You are bidding against other companies that are trying to do the same thing, capture your potential customer's attention. Some times those "bidders" are your direct competitors. Other times they are just another company that wants the same ad inventory you do. You have to be able to buy that inventory in a profitable manner, or the bigger you grow (if you are not viral) the closer you will get to failure, because each new customer is losing you money.

A perfect world can exist between viral and acquired. Customer acquisition can be done in a calculated manner to get the ball rolling in niches or channels which have not heard of your company.

If your product isn't viral, and it isn't all that spectacular (meaning a whole lot of things), eventually someone is going to copy it, and both your growth and margins will vaporize.

[pan69]

The problem with viral is of course that it's not really a choice. When something is truly viral it became so by accident. You can't have a board meeting and decide; "OK guys, time for this thing to go viral!" and not expect to first have to launch an expensive media campaign.

[bennesvig]

I'd think building virality into a product or service is one of the cheaper ways of acquiring customers. If you create something that works on its own, but is more fun when friends are using it, people are going to do the marketing for you. Instagram is a great example.

[fizzbar]

"Virality" is not something anyone has figured out how to bottle up and reproduce (and if they have, they're not sharing).

The music industry analogy would be to say "just make all your songs into hit records, that's how you get listeners".