Baked-in virality

Jay’s post-mortem about how and why Zlappo (the Twitter scheduling tool I used) failed was instructive. The point about baked-in virality and product-led growth is particularly resonant.

The idea is that you want to bake in some sort of virality into the product itself, to make it easier to market your product. Like say you can set up a free website but at the bottom of the free site there’s a “Powered by X” link. Mailchimp does that/ Carrd does that. Many successful products have that. The benefit of baked-in virality is how marketing becomes user-generated. When users share their websites, they are unintentionally marketing your platform for you, without even trying. You don’t even need them to be affiliates – as part of the transaction of getting a free thing from you, they willingly accept the branding on their site, and the unintentional marketing they’re doing for you.

Building a product is hard enough, and marketing makes it even harder. Make that 10x more if you’re a solo founder. So anything that can automate or outsource that even a little will go a long way. Product-led growth is the way.

The hard question I had to ask myself: If I stopped marketing and the product stops selling, did I really have a good product?

The real honest answer: No.

I look at Lifelog, and that was it’s fate back then when I stopped mentioning it on Twitter. And Twitter wasn’t even a great distribution channel for it.

I look at my Carrd plugins projects. It marketed itself in a small way, through SEO, word of mouth, free tools as top of funnel, and some baked-in viral elements like adding a link to my main site in the templates. Not enough to go super viral, but had some semblance to baked-in virality which was what made it promising. Promising, but not great.

I look at Sheet2Bio, and it had the elements of baked-in virality with the “Made by sheet2Bio” link at the bottom of each bio page. But product-market fit was lacking, and my execution of it even more so. So this was instructive too - baked-in virality is not a magic pill - it won’t solve all your problems.

Each one of my 3 products provided a different facet and nuance to baked-in virality.

I wonder if my next product will look like if I combined all that I learned into it…