Lenny DistilledGrowth → Acquisition
Only fundamentally different gets customers to tell their friends. Incrementally better doesn't cut through the noise and the volume of the noise has just gone up so much in the last 15 years.
To get to recommendation, you're going to blow your users' socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible. And when you are in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's when you get it.
When we entered markets, if we entered with a product that was priced at say 5.9%, and the alternative was six, customers would use us, but they wouldn't talk about us. We only got the advocacy when we were eight to 10 times cheaper.
The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.
Virality is really when the word of mouth of a product is high quality. It's when customers market your product.
If you pick the right feeling, it typically tracks pretty closely with the metric you care about. So, for example, we don't have a growth team and we have no semblance of growth projects. However, in many of the new features that we put out into the world, we want people to feel surprise or joy or an emotion like that. Guess what? When people feel that way, they go, 'Oh, my God, what was that?' And they start telling their friends and family about it, and they start dropping a screenshot in Slack, et cetera.
There is no such thing as a truly viral product. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7. The true secret behind virality is word of mouth. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product.
Products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem. This is the bedrock of virality.