Lesson 8: Viral Products

Viral Products – How One Guy Sold the World on $80 Used Tissues

A company called Vaev sold used tissues for $80 to allow people to choose when to get sick, according to media reports. The Los Angeles-based company states online: “We believe that when flu season comes around, you should be able to get sick on your terms. We believe using a tissue that carries a human sneeze is safer than needles or pills.” The company was reportedly sold out online for months.

Welcome to the world of viral products! A viral product is spread person to person, rather than through a marketing plan. A viral product is evangelized by people who are buying the product.

Another example of a viral product is “Cards Against Humanity,” a card game that was started by a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised $15,000 by early 2011. A month after the game was launched, it became the number one game on Amazon.com. Once again, a viral product was birthed.

To make a product go viral, you need users telling other users how cool or amazing your product is – “word of mouth,” which is the least expensive form of advertising. But you cannot spend your way to making a viral product. You need to make a product that really excites and delights customers. This should be your focus. Solve one problem that people care about.

Being a “good” product is not necessarily going to make your product go viral. A huge battery phone was a product, for example, that started to go viral at the Consumer Electronics Conference (CES) while it was on display. However, the company tried to turn it into a viral product, and it failed. Many products are flashes in the pan.

Nonetheless, there are things you can do to put a product in a better position to potentially go viral:

• It needs to connect with the identities and desires of users.

• It needs to generate emotion in them, whether it’s making them feel important, validated, or intelligent.

• Make it easy to sign up for or log into

• It needs to be easy to learn and easy to use.

• Make it easy to share with others.

Speed is key to the viral cycle. This is why making it easy is so important. You can allow customers to sign up through Google or Facebook, for example. You can also add social media sharing buttons to accelerate the sharing with others.

But for a product to go viral, the scale you need to be thinking is along the lines of each existing user getting 10-20 more users to sign up and use your product. Then your product can start getting into the viral cycle, either proving to be a flash in the pan or a truly viral product that takes off.

One recommendation to help you figure out whether your product can potentially go viral is to put the product in front of users and closely observe how they use it, and then (here’s the important thing): remove steps of action that users must take. If your product is a four-step process, get it down to a one or two step process. Radical simplicity will help you make a successful product, if it is solving a problem that users care about. 

And even if it doesn’t go “viral,” you can still build a successful business on a product that excites users; you’ll just need to invest more in marketing and master the management of the sales funnel – something you’ll need to do for long-term sustainability after the viral hype cycle fades anyway.