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Virality

4 claims3 moments1 on the cutting room floor
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Lenny's Written Position

Most companies find the vast majority of growth from just one of four engines -- virality, performance marketing, content, or sales -- and optimizing a secondary engine before scaling the core one is rarely time well spent.

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There are seven distinct types of virality across three categories: word-of-mouth (offline and online), invitation (social, incentivized, utility), and experiential (passive and active).

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Virality is a natural fit for products that are better with friends, innately fun to share, or remarkable enough to talk about, while performance marketing fits revenue-generating products and content fits those generating public UGC.

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Magical growth loops where existing users recruit new users come in four types: supply driving demand, demand driving supply, demand driving demand (virality), and supply driving supply.

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Podcast Moments

Oji Udezue00:00:00
“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.”

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue

Oji Udezue00:00:00
“Slack wasn't even viral, there was no synthetic virality. Slack couldn't even connect to organizations for the longest time. But what happens when you went to lunch? People are like, 'We got Slack and this is amazing.' This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.”

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue

Oji Udezue00:00:00
“This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.”

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue

Cutting Room Floor

Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.

Oji UdezueUnsynthesized
“This is the bedrock of virality. Build a great product that solves a sharp problem.”

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue