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Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a "viral loop"-to use the product means having to share it with others. After all, what's the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The end result is a business that spreads rapidly, scales quickly, and has the promise to create staggering wealth. In this game-changing, essential book, Penenberg-who identified the phenomenon in a ground-breaking cover story for Fast Company-tells the fascinating, vivid story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses (some with billion-dollar valuations) that we have all grown to rely on. While Viral Loop is fascinating for Penenberg's savvy, incisive explanation of the concept, it's even more valuable for its prescriptive nature. Throughout the book, Penenberg illustrates how any kind of business can uncork viral loops to benefit its own bottom line, even retrofitting the concept for the offline world. Penenberg explores viral loops and their impact on contemporary American business, while illustrating how all kinds of businesses-from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations-can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology.
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First published October 1, 2009
119 people are currently reading
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About the author
Adam L. Penenberg
12 books29 followersAdam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University who has written for Fast Company, Forbes, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Playboy, and the Economist. A former senior editor at Forbes and a reporter for Forbes.com, Penenberg garnered national attention in 1998 for unmasking serial fabricator Stephen Glass of the New Republic. Penenberg’s story was a watershed for online investigative journalism and portrayed in the film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg).
Penenberg has publishedseveral books that have been optioned for the movies and serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Wired UK, and the Financial Times , and won a Deadline Club Award for feature reporting for his Fast Company story “Revenge of the Nerd,” which looked at the future of moviemaking. He hasappeared on NBC’s The Today Show as well as on CNN and all the major news networks,and been quoted about media and technology in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Wired News, Ad Age, Marketwatch, Politico.
Penenberg has publishedseveral books that have been optioned for the movies and serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Wired UK, and the Financial Times , and won a Deadline Club Award for feature reporting for his Fast Company story “Revenge of the Nerd,” which looked at the future of moviemaking. He hasappeared on NBC’s The Today Show as well as on CNN and all the major news networks,and been quoted about media and technology in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Wired News, Ad Age, Marketwatch, Politico.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
May 22, 2011
My initial thinking was that this book would provide reasons for the viral spread of something. Rather it turned out to be more about the stories behind products and ideas that gone viral. That still proved very interesting and seems to reinforce the concept that there is no specific 'formula' for what makes something go viral.
The book provides some interesting insight into many of the products and services we know well, such as Netscape and EBay, that have grow from humble beginnings into multi billion dollar businesses. The book does contain examples of how viral growth was seeded by things such as the Hotmail email signature tag.
What the book probably best illustrates is how simple ideas can catch on and grow beyond the wildest dreams of their inventors. All you need is an idea and then some strategy to allow it to be shared. The Internet now makes such a strategy much easier but is does not however guarantee success by any means.
The book is easy to read and is very entertaining. Inside it does contain the reasons why some products go viral but these by by no means can applies to other products. However, the book does demonstrate how very simply ideas, with virtually no formal marketing or advertising can grow astronomically with no investment except for networking people.
The book provides some interesting insight into many of the products and services we know well, such as Netscape and EBay, that have grow from humble beginnings into multi billion dollar businesses. The book does contain examples of how viral growth was seeded by things such as the Hotmail email signature tag.
What the book probably best illustrates is how simple ideas can catch on and grow beyond the wildest dreams of their inventors. All you need is an idea and then some strategy to allow it to be shared. The Internet now makes such a strategy much easier but is does not however guarantee success by any means.
The book is easy to read and is very entertaining. Inside it does contain the reasons why some products go viral but these by by no means can applies to other products. However, the book does demonstrate how very simply ideas, with virtually no formal marketing or advertising can grow astronomically with no investment except for networking people.
did-not-finish
November 28, 2011I'm not sure if it was the narrator -- probably the most annoying in the history of audiobooks -- or the content that made me pull the plug on this one. Said content was like some strange time-warp to 1999 where the internetz was gunna revolutionize everything all god's children were gonna own their own submarines. Isn't there enough of this BS out there already? Whatever. But to believe this twaddle you need to be without critical faculty, without sense of history and utterly devoid of common sense. 'Course since that describes more people that not, I guess I just answered my own question.
May 1, 2018
A great introduction to the concept of virality. Walks you down to some of the very powerful viral products, at the same time also covers some of the very successful failures. Mostly covers the social industry from mid-1990's to late 2000's. Covers the products alongside the evolution of the web, right from the first web browser to Twitter. Lays importance on some the significant developments in the web and their impact, for example, the first browser, images, and hyperlinks in websites, email etc. It is more stories/facts of the social products launched between mid-1990's to late 2000's detailing on how they became viral than explaining the science behind it. Hooked by Nir Eyal would be a good follow up after this. It's a very interesting read if you want to know how the people in the last decade spent their time on internet socially.
September 12, 2016
Viral Loop
by Adam Penenberg
Adam Penenberg wrote the book Viral Loop to help us understand why things go viral, and how you can do it for your business.
Building a “viral business” isn’t a new concept. Tupperware has selling plastic containers since 1948 by employing a viral loop. The entire model is predicated on current salespeople bringing in more salespeople.
But there’s a big difference between making a viral video and building a viral business. A viral business builds the virality into the product itself. The product grows merely because it’s users are using the product.
A famous example of this is when Hotmail left a link in the body of every message, offering the recipient a free webmail account. The more emails Hotmail users sent, the more people who signed up for the service.
Let’s dig in.
Building a Viral Business
Many many years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg’s parents had even met, Tupperware was tapping into vast social networks of women to create an enormously viral business.
In 1949, a woman by the name of Brownie Wise held what is believed to be the world’s first Tupperware party - although at the time she called them “Poly-T parties”, which was the name of the material Tupperware was made out of. You’ve probably been invited to a party like this in recent years, with a vast number of new companies popping up using a similar model.
In 1949 alone, Wise sold $152,149.13 of Tupperware, which today would be worth more than $1.4 million.
More parties not only meant more buyers, it also created more sellers, which in turn created more buyers, which in turn created…and so the loop went.
Eventually Wise became the first woman to ever land on the cover of Business Week, which included her quote: “If we build the people, they’ll build the business.”
This type of business model is what drove (and continues to drive) the success of scores of Internet businesses around the world. Before we talk about them, we first need to understand some simple but powerful math. Enter the viral co-efficient.
Understanding the Viral Co-efficient
A viral coefficient tells you how many people the average new user brings in to the business or network. Let’s start off with a quick example, assuming that we start off with 10 users.
If after those initial 10 people signed up, they in turn got 6 more people to sign up, we end up with a viral co-efficient of 0.6, meaning for every new user you get, they will bring in another 0.6 people through their networks. So the first 10 will bring in 6 new users, and those 6 will bring in 4 new users, and those 4 will bring in 2 new users, until eventually the viral effect ends after 6 loops.
Now let’s consider what happens if you start off with the same 10 people and had a viral co-efficient of 0.9. Those initial 10 people would bring in 9 more people, who in turn would bring in 8 more people, who in turn would bring in 7 more people, and so on. The viral loop under this condition wouldn’t end until the 17th loop, when you would und up with 85 new members. So, just by increasing your viral co-efficient from 0.6 to 0.9, you’ve added an enormous amount of people coming in to your system.
Now, let’s consider when you jump up your co-efficient again up from 0.9 to 1.2. Those initial 10 people bring in 12 more people, who in turn bring in another 14 people, who in turn bring in another 16 people, and so on. Under this scenario the loop never ends, and at the end of the 17th loop, where the 0.6 scenario brought in 25 users and the 0.9 scenario brought in 85 users, you’ll have 1,281 users.
The math suggests that as soon as you go from a co-efficient less than 1 to a co-efficient greater than one, your growth moves from linear to exponential. The Holy Grail of business growth.
The Characteristics of Viral Loop Businesses
Before you drop everything to figure out to apply this to your business, there are eight characteristics that almost all successful viral loop companies share: First, they are web-based. The Internet is what makes this type of true viral growth work.
Second, they are free. The business models all of these business use is overlay another revenue stream later - either premium features, or by selling advertising to outside companies on the site.
Third, they don’t create the content themselves, their users do. Google is a great example of this - they simply organize the content produced on the Internet.
Fourth, they use a simple concept that is easy to use.
Fifth, there is built-in virality. Users spread the product simply by using it.
Sixth, there is extremely fast adoption.
Seventh, there is exponential and predictable growth. If the product is designed with the proper viral hooks, the viral growth will typically happen at a predictable rate.
Eighth, there are network effects built in. Basically, the more people that use the service, the more valuable the service becomes. Consider the advent of the telephone. If you are the first and only person to buy a telephone, the service is basically useless to you - you’ve got nobody to call. But as more and more people purchase telephones, the more valuable it becomes to own one.
If your business is going to take advantage of true viral growth, it will need to have most or all of these elements built in.
Viral Marketing
For those of us not blessed with business models that lend themselves to virality, it’s time to start thinking about how to make our marketing go viral.
Sabeer Bhatia was an aspiring entrepreneur struggling to get funding for his product JavaSoft, a set of web development tools he and his partner created to help make development easier and faster. He had been passed over 20 times by the time he got the the offices of Steve Jurveston, a partner at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston. Jurveston was about to be their 21st “no” until Bhatia started talking about a feature of their product - webmail.
Users of JavaSoft would use webmail to communicate with one another. At this point, you had an email address you used at your computer at work, and another email address you used at home on your home computer. There was no service that would allow you to check mail on the go, and Jurveston correctly assumed that there would be a pent up demand for such a service.
Bhatia and Jack Smith ended up calling the product Hotmail, and DFJ funded it. At the time there was no business model for it, and the question about how they would acquire new users was on everybody’s mind. Bhatia wanted to use billboard and radio advertising, but Jurveston countered that it was far too expensive for a product they were giving away for free.
Recalling the Tupperware case study he had heard when receiving his MBA at Harvard, Tim Draper (the Draper in DFJ) wondered if they could do something like that with webmail. He suggested that the put a message at the bottom of every email sent through Hotmail that said: “P.S.: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”
Bhatia and Smith hated the idea, and launched Hotmail without it. People were signing up for Hotmail, but not at the rate they had hoped. Draper pressed the issue, and Bhatia and Smith finally agreed to include the message, but without the “P.S. I love you” part. Growth immediately shot through the roof, and within six months they had a million users signed up to the service.
At the beginning, their viral co-efficient was 2, meaning that for every user that started using Hotmail, they brought in 2 more users with them. By the end of their first year they had 5 million users, and were registering 60,000 new users a day. The company eventually sold itself to Microsoft for $400 million. Not a bad haul for a company that was one and a half years old.
So the first lesson and only lesson in viral marketing is to have your users do the marketing for you, whenever you can.
Tweaking Your Viral Coefficient
If at first you don’t succeed at getting your viral coefficient above 1, try, try again. Michael Birch, the guy who founded and then sold the social network Bebo, has a very interesting backstory that includes tinkering and toying with his products until they get the virality he’s looking for.
In fact, it took him three failed businesses to get to his first winner. In 2001, he created a business called Birthday Alarm, which was a tool to remind people of their friends’ birthdays. The first step in actually using the service was to email all your friends to ask them when their birthday was.
The site grew slowly at first, so he started tinkering. The simpler he made the site, the more viral the service became. Then he added a cut and paste function so that you didn’t have to type your friends’ email address. In just a few short keystrokes you could transfer the entire address book into Birthday Alarm. This pushed the viral coefficient above 1, with ten thousand people a day joining.
The next experiment they tried was a tool that would automatically import your contacts, which made the email import process even easier. They started with Hotmail address books, and on the first day the tool launched the signups jumped up all the way to 100,000 per day.
The lesson here is simple. In order to get to true viral growth, you need to constantly tweak and test to see what works.
Conclusion
Creating a business or a marketing strategy that goes viral is an extremely difficult task. But if you can take a few lessons away from those who have done it successfully in the past, and are willing to put in the time and effort to refine your model, you just might be on your way to growing a viral business yourself.
by Adam Penenberg
Adam Penenberg wrote the book Viral Loop to help us understand why things go viral, and how you can do it for your business.
Building a “viral business” isn’t a new concept. Tupperware has selling plastic containers since 1948 by employing a viral loop. The entire model is predicated on current salespeople bringing in more salespeople.
But there’s a big difference between making a viral video and building a viral business. A viral business builds the virality into the product itself. The product grows merely because it’s users are using the product.
A famous example of this is when Hotmail left a link in the body of every message, offering the recipient a free webmail account. The more emails Hotmail users sent, the more people who signed up for the service.
Let’s dig in.
Building a Viral Business
Many many years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg’s parents had even met, Tupperware was tapping into vast social networks of women to create an enormously viral business.
In 1949, a woman by the name of Brownie Wise held what is believed to be the world’s first Tupperware party - although at the time she called them “Poly-T parties”, which was the name of the material Tupperware was made out of. You’ve probably been invited to a party like this in recent years, with a vast number of new companies popping up using a similar model.
In 1949 alone, Wise sold $152,149.13 of Tupperware, which today would be worth more than $1.4 million.
More parties not only meant more buyers, it also created more sellers, which in turn created more buyers, which in turn created…and so the loop went.
Eventually Wise became the first woman to ever land on the cover of Business Week, which included her quote: “If we build the people, they’ll build the business.”
This type of business model is what drove (and continues to drive) the success of scores of Internet businesses around the world. Before we talk about them, we first need to understand some simple but powerful math. Enter the viral co-efficient.
Understanding the Viral Co-efficient
A viral coefficient tells you how many people the average new user brings in to the business or network. Let’s start off with a quick example, assuming that we start off with 10 users.
If after those initial 10 people signed up, they in turn got 6 more people to sign up, we end up with a viral co-efficient of 0.6, meaning for every new user you get, they will bring in another 0.6 people through their networks. So the first 10 will bring in 6 new users, and those 6 will bring in 4 new users, and those 4 will bring in 2 new users, until eventually the viral effect ends after 6 loops.
Now let’s consider what happens if you start off with the same 10 people and had a viral co-efficient of 0.9. Those initial 10 people would bring in 9 more people, who in turn would bring in 8 more people, who in turn would bring in 7 more people, and so on. The viral loop under this condition wouldn’t end until the 17th loop, when you would und up with 85 new members. So, just by increasing your viral co-efficient from 0.6 to 0.9, you’ve added an enormous amount of people coming in to your system.
Now, let’s consider when you jump up your co-efficient again up from 0.9 to 1.2. Those initial 10 people bring in 12 more people, who in turn bring in another 14 people, who in turn bring in another 16 people, and so on. Under this scenario the loop never ends, and at the end of the 17th loop, where the 0.6 scenario brought in 25 users and the 0.9 scenario brought in 85 users, you’ll have 1,281 users.
The math suggests that as soon as you go from a co-efficient less than 1 to a co-efficient greater than one, your growth moves from linear to exponential. The Holy Grail of business growth.
The Characteristics of Viral Loop Businesses
Before you drop everything to figure out to apply this to your business, there are eight characteristics that almost all successful viral loop companies share: First, they are web-based. The Internet is what makes this type of true viral growth work.
Second, they are free. The business models all of these business use is overlay another revenue stream later - either premium features, or by selling advertising to outside companies on the site.
Third, they don’t create the content themselves, their users do. Google is a great example of this - they simply organize the content produced on the Internet.
Fourth, they use a simple concept that is easy to use.
Fifth, there is built-in virality. Users spread the product simply by using it.
Sixth, there is extremely fast adoption.
Seventh, there is exponential and predictable growth. If the product is designed with the proper viral hooks, the viral growth will typically happen at a predictable rate.
Eighth, there are network effects built in. Basically, the more people that use the service, the more valuable the service becomes. Consider the advent of the telephone. If you are the first and only person to buy a telephone, the service is basically useless to you - you’ve got nobody to call. But as more and more people purchase telephones, the more valuable it becomes to own one.
If your business is going to take advantage of true viral growth, it will need to have most or all of these elements built in.
Viral Marketing
For those of us not blessed with business models that lend themselves to virality, it’s time to start thinking about how to make our marketing go viral.
Sabeer Bhatia was an aspiring entrepreneur struggling to get funding for his product JavaSoft, a set of web development tools he and his partner created to help make development easier and faster. He had been passed over 20 times by the time he got the the offices of Steve Jurveston, a partner at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston. Jurveston was about to be their 21st “no” until Bhatia started talking about a feature of their product - webmail.
Users of JavaSoft would use webmail to communicate with one another. At this point, you had an email address you used at your computer at work, and another email address you used at home on your home computer. There was no service that would allow you to check mail on the go, and Jurveston correctly assumed that there would be a pent up demand for such a service.
Bhatia and Jack Smith ended up calling the product Hotmail, and DFJ funded it. At the time there was no business model for it, and the question about how they would acquire new users was on everybody’s mind. Bhatia wanted to use billboard and radio advertising, but Jurveston countered that it was far too expensive for a product they were giving away for free.
Recalling the Tupperware case study he had heard when receiving his MBA at Harvard, Tim Draper (the Draper in DFJ) wondered if they could do something like that with webmail. He suggested that the put a message at the bottom of every email sent through Hotmail that said: “P.S.: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”
Bhatia and Smith hated the idea, and launched Hotmail without it. People were signing up for Hotmail, but not at the rate they had hoped. Draper pressed the issue, and Bhatia and Smith finally agreed to include the message, but without the “P.S. I love you” part. Growth immediately shot through the roof, and within six months they had a million users signed up to the service.
At the beginning, their viral co-efficient was 2, meaning that for every user that started using Hotmail, they brought in 2 more users with them. By the end of their first year they had 5 million users, and were registering 60,000 new users a day. The company eventually sold itself to Microsoft for $400 million. Not a bad haul for a company that was one and a half years old.
So the first lesson and only lesson in viral marketing is to have your users do the marketing for you, whenever you can.
Tweaking Your Viral Coefficient
If at first you don’t succeed at getting your viral coefficient above 1, try, try again. Michael Birch, the guy who founded and then sold the social network Bebo, has a very interesting backstory that includes tinkering and toying with his products until they get the virality he’s looking for.
In fact, it took him three failed businesses to get to his first winner. In 2001, he created a business called Birthday Alarm, which was a tool to remind people of their friends’ birthdays. The first step in actually using the service was to email all your friends to ask them when their birthday was.
The site grew slowly at first, so he started tinkering. The simpler he made the site, the more viral the service became. Then he added a cut and paste function so that you didn’t have to type your friends’ email address. In just a few short keystrokes you could transfer the entire address book into Birthday Alarm. This pushed the viral coefficient above 1, with ten thousand people a day joining.
The next experiment they tried was a tool that would automatically import your contacts, which made the email import process even easier. They started with Hotmail address books, and on the first day the tool launched the signups jumped up all the way to 100,000 per day.
The lesson here is simple. In order to get to true viral growth, you need to constantly tweak and test to see what works.
Conclusion
Creating a business or a marketing strategy that goes viral is an extremely difficult task. But if you can take a few lessons away from those who have done it successfully in the past, and are willing to put in the time and effort to refine your model, you just might be on your way to growing a viral business yourself.
July 12, 2020
Early Attempt to Sequence the Genome of Digital Virality
Most of us know the word “viral” when it comes to the popularity of online content, yet few relate it to the infamous, simple organisms which have wreaked havoc for millennia in the offline world and decades in the online one. A virus always comes with a negative connotation, but the premise of this book, Viral Loop: The power of Pass-It-on, is to paint virality in the positive sense of a benign tool for business profit. So was it successful in this endeavor?
The book starts with the interesting story of the founders of Hot-Or-Not, one of the first dating web-applications around the turn of the millennium, many years before swiping left was even an idea. The usual young founders found in many startup stories, one who does all the technical work while the other handles the marketing, team up to conquer the world of dating in their college and come up with the ingenious — back then — idea of rating people’s photos. Their overnight popularity brings them the potential of vast riches, as well as instant demise if they are not careful about scalability.
The story continues with their struggle to maintain the website with their limited resources when so many users are trying to access it simultaneously; then it reaches the conclusion when it the company passes a point of non-displacement and is ripe to become a big fish on its own or be sold to one. This sequence repeats across the book, albeit with different names and ideas; the outline is always the same: an idea, an action, a struggle, and then a conclusion. It’s a pattern that can also be found in many novels and biographies since it is very engaging to the reader and provides a sense of purpose early on.
That’s exactly the strong point of Viral Loop. The book has loads of stories about young people amid the dot-com boom and shortly after the bust with dreams, opening a startup to develop an idea that could change the world. Nevertheless, it also offers anecdotes from way before the Internet revolution, back when even the TV was a novelty. The inspiring story of Tuppelware’s saleswoman, Brownie Wise, who started a referral scheme to market the company’s products through house parties is — a bit ironic given the book’s coupling with technology — the best one that would explain the concept of viral marketing in a tangible and pure manner. No spamming, no broadcasting, and no targeted advertising algorithms, the marketing then was based on the simplest and most powerful of all marketing forms: word-of-mouth.
From there, we get acquainted with the most important aspect of viral marketing, that is when the customer himself becomes a selling agent. This simple idea of providing the client with a profit incentive to expand the product’s audience is what closes the viral loop and creates the most efficient, yet the cheapest form of marketing. The book paints it as an invention when it’s, in reality, a discovery, one which must have been there even way before Tupperware’s successful experiment.
The book’s second example of viral originality is Ponzi schemes. This is even more interesting than Tupperware’s example due to the negative connotation, yet it sheds light on the same powerful characteristics of profit incentives and referral strategies. The fact that the conclusion of Ponzi schemes was disastrous also sets the reader's expectations straight about virality and the potentiality of catastrophic failures as much as it may promise spectacular successes.
In his attempt to formalize the analysis, Adam L. Perenberg tries to split the book into three parts: Viral Business, Viral Marketing, and Viral Networks. At first glance, such distinction would make sense, but reading on, all the anecdotes seem to have the same morale and the supposedly distinctive boundaries seem to get blurrier and blurrier. In each section, one would come with a few new concepts and definitions, yet the majority of information sounds somewhat similar. At times, I felt the book was becoming numbly repetitive, or repetitively numb, even though Software Engineering is my technical background and tech startups are a special interest of mine!
Perhaps that was the reason. In every chapter, one senses some avoidance in the writer’s language when it comes to technical jargon or scientific analysis. The book has a couple of equations regarding the important concept of the Viral Coefficient which indicates if a site’s popularity (like a social network’s inhabitants) is increasing or not. This is tightly coupled with real-life, biological virality, as when analyzing the spread of a pandemic, a parallel I would have loved if the writer scrutinized it a bit more. Moreover, the equations are not even well described, which may leave some confused readers.
As for the target audience, people with business aspirations and the entrepreneur wannabes, the book would be full of inspiration, but lacking in recipes of success, save from what one can parse out of the anecdotes; mainly, that quick growth require vigilant scalability (tolerance for adding resources), and that negotiation with the big fish should always be from a position of power. When it comes to the viral concepts, there is really not much that we don’t know, like the good old referral system, adding viral hooks in your product to fish for new users, and giving something for free. Another important concept is the stackability of business, like Paypal first only thriving in the eBay ecosystem. They are well-known concepts, but it may be interesting for some to see them analyzed in a historical sense.
The book also touches some other interesting areas like the slow demise of traditional physical media, the imminent death of privacy as we know it (here, the writer tries to paint it in a good light, albeit not so successfully), and the meteoric rise of Facebook. There are bits and pieces of history that may also surprise the reader; like it was news for me that Elon Musk wasn’t actually a founder of Paypal, but rather of the company which merged with Confinity, Paypal’s creator. He eventually became its CEO but was kicked out when he wanted to transform the company from Linux to Microsoft, among other things. Adam ends the book with a review of the then-popular viral businesses, including failed ones, and a philosophical epilogue specifying the viral characteristics of religion, language, money, and the Human Population Growth.
Personally, I found the epilogue’s comparisons very interesting since I was also thinking about them turning the pages of the book, which begs another question that passed my mind back then: if these life concepts are also viral, wouldn’t it be the same for any business like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, for instance? Adam’s answer in the book is a list of characteristics of any viral loop company, including being web-based and free, but I find such a list very limiting and not even true to all the anecdotes in the book!
Viral Loop is both entertaining and informative, yet it falls short from canonizing what is viral and what is not. I finished the book knowing a bit more about the history of many of the starting up of biggest tech companies, the struggle of gaining a foot in the market, and what it takes to increase the reach within the community, yet not about what makes a particular video being shared by millions (he touched the subject but only in relation with a very specific case), or why rumors spread so easily, subjects that I thought were more interesting than spending so much time predicting the success of the now all-but-dead “social network of social networks” Ning! Not sure why this is even considered different from Yahoo Groups, for example. My last pet peeve is that there was no comparison between generalism and minimalism and its effect on virality, or, in other words if it’s better to address a niche and when.
Reading the book in 2020 when it was written in 2009 may not do the writer full justice. However, it’s a book that touched business and engineering, while being clearly lacking when it comes to psychology, and, perhaps, that’s why it didn’t age so well, and, perhaps, that’s why it wasn’t so viral.
Most of us know the word “viral” when it comes to the popularity of online content, yet few relate it to the infamous, simple organisms which have wreaked havoc for millennia in the offline world and decades in the online one. A virus always comes with a negative connotation, but the premise of this book, Viral Loop: The power of Pass-It-on, is to paint virality in the positive sense of a benign tool for business profit. So was it successful in this endeavor?
The book starts with the interesting story of the founders of Hot-Or-Not, one of the first dating web-applications around the turn of the millennium, many years before swiping left was even an idea. The usual young founders found in many startup stories, one who does all the technical work while the other handles the marketing, team up to conquer the world of dating in their college and come up with the ingenious — back then — idea of rating people’s photos. Their overnight popularity brings them the potential of vast riches, as well as instant demise if they are not careful about scalability.
The story continues with their struggle to maintain the website with their limited resources when so many users are trying to access it simultaneously; then it reaches the conclusion when it the company passes a point of non-displacement and is ripe to become a big fish on its own or be sold to one. This sequence repeats across the book, albeit with different names and ideas; the outline is always the same: an idea, an action, a struggle, and then a conclusion. It’s a pattern that can also be found in many novels and biographies since it is very engaging to the reader and provides a sense of purpose early on.
That’s exactly the strong point of Viral Loop. The book has loads of stories about young people amid the dot-com boom and shortly after the bust with dreams, opening a startup to develop an idea that could change the world. Nevertheless, it also offers anecdotes from way before the Internet revolution, back when even the TV was a novelty. The inspiring story of Tuppelware’s saleswoman, Brownie Wise, who started a referral scheme to market the company’s products through house parties is — a bit ironic given the book’s coupling with technology — the best one that would explain the concept of viral marketing in a tangible and pure manner. No spamming, no broadcasting, and no targeted advertising algorithms, the marketing then was based on the simplest and most powerful of all marketing forms: word-of-mouth.
From there, we get acquainted with the most important aspect of viral marketing, that is when the customer himself becomes a selling agent. This simple idea of providing the client with a profit incentive to expand the product’s audience is what closes the viral loop and creates the most efficient, yet the cheapest form of marketing. The book paints it as an invention when it’s, in reality, a discovery, one which must have been there even way before Tupperware’s successful experiment.
The book’s second example of viral originality is Ponzi schemes. This is even more interesting than Tupperware’s example due to the negative connotation, yet it sheds light on the same powerful characteristics of profit incentives and referral strategies. The fact that the conclusion of Ponzi schemes was disastrous also sets the reader's expectations straight about virality and the potentiality of catastrophic failures as much as it may promise spectacular successes.
In his attempt to formalize the analysis, Adam L. Perenberg tries to split the book into three parts: Viral Business, Viral Marketing, and Viral Networks. At first glance, such distinction would make sense, but reading on, all the anecdotes seem to have the same morale and the supposedly distinctive boundaries seem to get blurrier and blurrier. In each section, one would come with a few new concepts and definitions, yet the majority of information sounds somewhat similar. At times, I felt the book was becoming numbly repetitive, or repetitively numb, even though Software Engineering is my technical background and tech startups are a special interest of mine!
Perhaps that was the reason. In every chapter, one senses some avoidance in the writer’s language when it comes to technical jargon or scientific analysis. The book has a couple of equations regarding the important concept of the Viral Coefficient which indicates if a site’s popularity (like a social network’s inhabitants) is increasing or not. This is tightly coupled with real-life, biological virality, as when analyzing the spread of a pandemic, a parallel I would have loved if the writer scrutinized it a bit more. Moreover, the equations are not even well described, which may leave some confused readers.
As for the target audience, people with business aspirations and the entrepreneur wannabes, the book would be full of inspiration, but lacking in recipes of success, save from what one can parse out of the anecdotes; mainly, that quick growth require vigilant scalability (tolerance for adding resources), and that negotiation with the big fish should always be from a position of power. When it comes to the viral concepts, there is really not much that we don’t know, like the good old referral system, adding viral hooks in your product to fish for new users, and giving something for free. Another important concept is the stackability of business, like Paypal first only thriving in the eBay ecosystem. They are well-known concepts, but it may be interesting for some to see them analyzed in a historical sense.
The book also touches some other interesting areas like the slow demise of traditional physical media, the imminent death of privacy as we know it (here, the writer tries to paint it in a good light, albeit not so successfully), and the meteoric rise of Facebook. There are bits and pieces of history that may also surprise the reader; like it was news for me that Elon Musk wasn’t actually a founder of Paypal, but rather of the company which merged with Confinity, Paypal’s creator. He eventually became its CEO but was kicked out when he wanted to transform the company from Linux to Microsoft, among other things. Adam ends the book with a review of the then-popular viral businesses, including failed ones, and a philosophical epilogue specifying the viral characteristics of religion, language, money, and the Human Population Growth.
Personally, I found the epilogue’s comparisons very interesting since I was also thinking about them turning the pages of the book, which begs another question that passed my mind back then: if these life concepts are also viral, wouldn’t it be the same for any business like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, for instance? Adam’s answer in the book is a list of characteristics of any viral loop company, including being web-based and free, but I find such a list very limiting and not even true to all the anecdotes in the book!
Viral Loop is both entertaining and informative, yet it falls short from canonizing what is viral and what is not. I finished the book knowing a bit more about the history of many of the starting up of biggest tech companies, the struggle of gaining a foot in the market, and what it takes to increase the reach within the community, yet not about what makes a particular video being shared by millions (he touched the subject but only in relation with a very specific case), or why rumors spread so easily, subjects that I thought were more interesting than spending so much time predicting the success of the now all-but-dead “social network of social networks” Ning! Not sure why this is even considered different from Yahoo Groups, for example. My last pet peeve is that there was no comparison between generalism and minimalism and its effect on virality, or, in other words if it’s better to address a niche and when.
Reading the book in 2020 when it was written in 2009 may not do the writer full justice. However, it’s a book that touched business and engineering, while being clearly lacking when it comes to psychology, and, perhaps, that’s why it didn’t age so well, and, perhaps, that’s why it wasn’t so viral.
September 5, 2024
My thoughts about the book:
Viral Loop is an interesting and easy-to-read book in which Adam L. Penenberg explains how some of our today’s most successful companies became what they are, and why some were almost too big to fail, but still failed in the end. Each chapter is its own journey for each app or company that the chapter is about. I like that the author also included how some companies fail, and that the book is not only about what worked, it is also about what didn’t work which is very important, and not many authors write about that. When reading how some founders didn’t actually invent something new, but took an existing idea and made a few modifications so the users could more easily use the app or use it for just a certain purpose instead of “everything” it reminds me of what I read in the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne when the authors talk how you don’t have to invents new things, you just need to find out what your customers are looking for and create a market for that or at least push the current market boundaries. The only bad thing I have to say about the book is that it is a bit outdated, but at the same time, it’s interesting to see how Adam L. Penenberg and others saw these companies at that time. I would love to see the author come out with a part two that would be written now.
To sum up, if you are interested in how people come up with ideas and how they implement those ideas and build successful companies or end up failing then Viral Loop by Adam L. Penenberg is a must-read.
A short summary of the book:
In the prologue of Viral Loops the author grabs your attention right away with the Hot or Not app story where he talks about how the two friends came up with the idea for the app, what were their initial problems when growing the app, and how they monetized it. In the end, James Hong and Jim Young sold the app for $20 million. Then in the introduction part the author talks about the positive feedback loop and the viral expansion loops. In short, he talks about how companies grow because each new user brings in more users and how by using the product they also spread it.
In part one of the book “Viral Business” the author lays the foundations of viral models by telling the story of Tupperware. The company Tupperware became so by chance when Mr. Tupper discovered that a byproduct when producing plastic filters for gas masks could be used to create a translucent material unlike any plastic of its day. It was unbreakable, flexible not brittle and it didn’t chip or retain odors. Before this Tupper was inventing all sorts of trivial products that never were adopted. But the problem was that Mr. Tupper was not a salesperson, he was an inventor and a perfectionist, which held him back with sales strategies. But that’s where Brownie Wise comes in, a single mother from Dearborn, Michigan who before working at Tupperware worked as a distributor for Stanley Home products. She came up with the strategy of Tupperware home parties which skyrocketed the sales. This story shows the power of virality as each new seller multiplied the sales potential like a Ponzi scheme but in a legitimate way. You will also get to read what were the growing pains, for example, the lack of production capacity and more. In “The First Online Viral Expansion Loop” chapter the author shares the story of Marc Andreessen, how and when he began programming, his journey to college, and how his first big program Mosaic was a success and then was “stolen” from him by his college. The story is not finished there as Andreessen develops a new better program that was a competition to Mosaic and was more successful. Yet again everything didn’t go smoothly as Andreessen’s former college had an issue with him building a competitive program and took legal actions which was in the end solved. In the “Spreadable Product as New Business Paradigm” chapter the author continues Marc Andreessen’s story with his latest company, Ning. This was a company that has been growing from the moment it launched and it was a “Social Network for Everything”, a free platform for everyone. The author shares how the company grew in numbers as geographically. Then he talks about creating double viral loops where different companies help each other with their own viral loop for example how YouTube took off by piggybacking on the success of MySpace and how Flickr grew in tandem with the entire blogosphere and so on. The author also talks about the dark side of virality and the risks that are part of it.
In part two of the book “Viral Marketing,” Adam L. Peneberg shares the story of Hotmail and its founders. The journey of Hotmail wasn’t as smooth as you might think and one big part of why it is here today is the negotiation skills of its founder Sabeer Bhatia. You will also read about the “P.S.: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail” strategy that skyrocketed the number of Hotmail users. A very interesting part that you don’t get to read a lot in other books about companies was when Batia was negotiating the price of Hotmail when selling it. In the following chapter, you get to read about how digital cameras and phones changed the film industry and the beginning of reality shows. The author then continues to present the potential of viral videos as marketing strategies with the example of the “Mentos and Coke geyser phenomenon” video on YouTube. The author presents the whole story from the beginning how the two friends came up with the idea for the video to the part where they were now paid to replicate their actions and how Coca-Cola and Mentos worked together and even held and promoted a contest for their consumers, all of which lead to better sales.
In part three of the book “Viral Networks”, the author starts out by telling the story of eBay, how it started, what were the biggest setbacks, how it almost failed because the site was down a lot because of too many users and it wasn’t able to process all the traffic it had. Did you know that eBay got its name in 1997. Before it was called AuctionWeb. Also, it got hacked in a big way in 1997, and in 1999 it still had problems with scalability and it almost shut down for good, but luckily eBay found the right person to solve the scalability problem which you can read more about in the book. In the next chapter, Adam L. Peneberg continues with the story of PayPal, well actually he starts with the story of one of the founders of PayPal Max Levchin, and how he met Peter Thiel, how they got the idea of storing money online and their journey forwards. This chapter was interesting as it also includes the funding part and what that brought with it to the company. The author also explains how PayPal stacked their business over eBay and how that helped them to achieve a symbiotic relationship, even though eBay didn’t like it too much at the beginning and tried to create their own company that would do the same as PayPal did. “Spoiler alert”, even though they succeeded at making a similar company as PayPal it didn’t work out and PayPal stayed dominant.
In the next chapter, the author continues with examples of how certain companies or applications grew their business and traffic by building services that the users could use on other apps, such as for example the MySpace apps that weren’t created by MySpace but users used them to differentiate their profiles from others. The same happened with Facebook when others developed apps for users to use on Facebook. The next chapter was about a young couple who tried creating multiple online businesses, and if any didn’t work they would easily let it go and go to the next one. The one that was successful and I had never heard of it was “Birthday Alarm” which was a very simple app to use and you can probably guess what you could use it for from the name. I also never heard of Bebo a social network that was very successful, especially in the UK, and at one point was the third biggest social network in the USA. When reading about these apps and social networks in this chapter you will read how the founders got their ideas, what were the setbacks, and how they solved them if they did. In the chapter “Viral Clusters” you will get to read about Facebook, how it started, and grew, and how Facebook and Myspace competed in which company would be more successful in creating viral elements that would win more users to their social network. In the final chapter ” The Search for a New AD Unit” you get to read the story of Google, and Facebook and how they changed the industry of advertisement.
If you want more reviews you can find them at https://purposefocuscommitment.com/bo...
Viral Loop is an interesting and easy-to-read book in which Adam L. Penenberg explains how some of our today’s most successful companies became what they are, and why some were almost too big to fail, but still failed in the end. Each chapter is its own journey for each app or company that the chapter is about. I like that the author also included how some companies fail, and that the book is not only about what worked, it is also about what didn’t work which is very important, and not many authors write about that. When reading how some founders didn’t actually invent something new, but took an existing idea and made a few modifications so the users could more easily use the app or use it for just a certain purpose instead of “everything” it reminds me of what I read in the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne when the authors talk how you don’t have to invents new things, you just need to find out what your customers are looking for and create a market for that or at least push the current market boundaries. The only bad thing I have to say about the book is that it is a bit outdated, but at the same time, it’s interesting to see how Adam L. Penenberg and others saw these companies at that time. I would love to see the author come out with a part two that would be written now.
To sum up, if you are interested in how people come up with ideas and how they implement those ideas and build successful companies or end up failing then Viral Loop by Adam L. Penenberg is a must-read.
A short summary of the book:
In the prologue of Viral Loops the author grabs your attention right away with the Hot or Not app story where he talks about how the two friends came up with the idea for the app, what were their initial problems when growing the app, and how they monetized it. In the end, James Hong and Jim Young sold the app for $20 million. Then in the introduction part the author talks about the positive feedback loop and the viral expansion loops. In short, he talks about how companies grow because each new user brings in more users and how by using the product they also spread it.
In part one of the book “Viral Business” the author lays the foundations of viral models by telling the story of Tupperware. The company Tupperware became so by chance when Mr. Tupper discovered that a byproduct when producing plastic filters for gas masks could be used to create a translucent material unlike any plastic of its day. It was unbreakable, flexible not brittle and it didn’t chip or retain odors. Before this Tupper was inventing all sorts of trivial products that never were adopted. But the problem was that Mr. Tupper was not a salesperson, he was an inventor and a perfectionist, which held him back with sales strategies. But that’s where Brownie Wise comes in, a single mother from Dearborn, Michigan who before working at Tupperware worked as a distributor for Stanley Home products. She came up with the strategy of Tupperware home parties which skyrocketed the sales. This story shows the power of virality as each new seller multiplied the sales potential like a Ponzi scheme but in a legitimate way. You will also get to read what were the growing pains, for example, the lack of production capacity and more. In “The First Online Viral Expansion Loop” chapter the author shares the story of Marc Andreessen, how and when he began programming, his journey to college, and how his first big program Mosaic was a success and then was “stolen” from him by his college. The story is not finished there as Andreessen develops a new better program that was a competition to Mosaic and was more successful. Yet again everything didn’t go smoothly as Andreessen’s former college had an issue with him building a competitive program and took legal actions which was in the end solved. In the “Spreadable Product as New Business Paradigm” chapter the author continues Marc Andreessen’s story with his latest company, Ning. This was a company that has been growing from the moment it launched and it was a “Social Network for Everything”, a free platform for everyone. The author shares how the company grew in numbers as geographically. Then he talks about creating double viral loops where different companies help each other with their own viral loop for example how YouTube took off by piggybacking on the success of MySpace and how Flickr grew in tandem with the entire blogosphere and so on. The author also talks about the dark side of virality and the risks that are part of it.
In part two of the book “Viral Marketing,” Adam L. Peneberg shares the story of Hotmail and its founders. The journey of Hotmail wasn’t as smooth as you might think and one big part of why it is here today is the negotiation skills of its founder Sabeer Bhatia. You will also read about the “P.S.: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail” strategy that skyrocketed the number of Hotmail users. A very interesting part that you don’t get to read a lot in other books about companies was when Batia was negotiating the price of Hotmail when selling it. In the following chapter, you get to read about how digital cameras and phones changed the film industry and the beginning of reality shows. The author then continues to present the potential of viral videos as marketing strategies with the example of the “Mentos and Coke geyser phenomenon” video on YouTube. The author presents the whole story from the beginning how the two friends came up with the idea for the video to the part where they were now paid to replicate their actions and how Coca-Cola and Mentos worked together and even held and promoted a contest for their consumers, all of which lead to better sales.
In part three of the book “Viral Networks”, the author starts out by telling the story of eBay, how it started, what were the biggest setbacks, how it almost failed because the site was down a lot because of too many users and it wasn’t able to process all the traffic it had. Did you know that eBay got its name in 1997. Before it was called AuctionWeb. Also, it got hacked in a big way in 1997, and in 1999 it still had problems with scalability and it almost shut down for good, but luckily eBay found the right person to solve the scalability problem which you can read more about in the book. In the next chapter, Adam L. Peneberg continues with the story of PayPal, well actually he starts with the story of one of the founders of PayPal Max Levchin, and how he met Peter Thiel, how they got the idea of storing money online and their journey forwards. This chapter was interesting as it also includes the funding part and what that brought with it to the company. The author also explains how PayPal stacked their business over eBay and how that helped them to achieve a symbiotic relationship, even though eBay didn’t like it too much at the beginning and tried to create their own company that would do the same as PayPal did. “Spoiler alert”, even though they succeeded at making a similar company as PayPal it didn’t work out and PayPal stayed dominant.
In the next chapter, the author continues with examples of how certain companies or applications grew their business and traffic by building services that the users could use on other apps, such as for example the MySpace apps that weren’t created by MySpace but users used them to differentiate their profiles from others. The same happened with Facebook when others developed apps for users to use on Facebook. The next chapter was about a young couple who tried creating multiple online businesses, and if any didn’t work they would easily let it go and go to the next one. The one that was successful and I had never heard of it was “Birthday Alarm” which was a very simple app to use and you can probably guess what you could use it for from the name. I also never heard of Bebo a social network that was very successful, especially in the UK, and at one point was the third biggest social network in the USA. When reading about these apps and social networks in this chapter you will read how the founders got their ideas, what were the setbacks, and how they solved them if they did. In the chapter “Viral Clusters” you will get to read about Facebook, how it started, and grew, and how Facebook and Myspace competed in which company would be more successful in creating viral elements that would win more users to their social network. In the final chapter ” The Search for a New AD Unit” you get to read the story of Google, and Facebook and how they changed the industry of advertisement.
If you want more reviews you can find them at https://purposefocuscommitment.com/bo...
March 16, 2017
The "title" and the "cover design" mend the perfect impression , good enough to make the book look exciting and promising.
But unfortunately the book wasn't any good (atleast to me) , except few of the stories like that of Tupperware , others couldn't make stick to the book.
I believe its the narration of the author which was boring 80% of the time and infact the language he used wasn't quite gripping , the book would had been far better if the terms and language used was aimed at ordinary reader .
I guess rhe author wrote the book totally focussing on the business persons and entrepreneurs.
It you don't fall in that category than I believe you will suffer as much as I did :)
Happy Reading.
But unfortunately the book wasn't any good (atleast to me) , except few of the stories like that of Tupperware , others couldn't make stick to the book.
I believe its the narration of the author which was boring 80% of the time and infact the language he used wasn't quite gripping , the book would had been far better if the terms and language used was aimed at ordinary reader .
I guess rhe author wrote the book totally focussing on the business persons and entrepreneurs.
It you don't fall in that category than I believe you will suffer as much as I did :)
Happy Reading.
November 24, 2024
It is a decently written book, though a lot of things are not up to date, which is probably a natural shortcoming for a book talking about a fasting changing industry. So, it is like Deluxe that I just read, easy to read, with a lot of stories of various website founders and how they raised capital from VCs and how they end up becoming rich and selling the company to bigger names.
This book is not as good as Deluxe, in that the author is kind of like a robot reporter, collecting various dot.com stories and telling them in a viral theme. As least, you know the author of Deluxe really spent her time visiting people and factories. Well, this author, I dont now, may easily write up the whole things on his home PC.
The so called viral loop and coefficient theory is just kind of no brainer. I have read too many social science books and business books, and this type of shallow stuff wont impress me now as before. So, just to get a bit fun from reading those stories of founders. That is it.
And ten years after this book was published, it is weird to read a book talking about dot.com like a high-tech thing, since people dont spend much time on dot.com. Even my 80 years old pap and mom now spend a lot of time on various APPs. So, who knows? In another ten years APPs will die, and all there is will be AI....
This book is not as good as Deluxe, in that the author is kind of like a robot reporter, collecting various dot.com stories and telling them in a viral theme. As least, you know the author of Deluxe really spent her time visiting people and factories. Well, this author, I dont now, may easily write up the whole things on his home PC.
The so called viral loop and coefficient theory is just kind of no brainer. I have read too many social science books and business books, and this type of shallow stuff wont impress me now as before. So, just to get a bit fun from reading those stories of founders. That is it.
And ten years after this book was published, it is weird to read a book talking about dot.com like a high-tech thing, since people dont spend much time on dot.com. Even my 80 years old pap and mom now spend a lot of time on various APPs. So, who knows? In another ten years APPs will die, and all there is will be AI....
December 4, 2018
When the VP of Marketing of Facebook told you to read this book so you read it! At first, I was gonna give 3 stars but changed my mind as I dug it. Although this book was published around 2009 and I read it in 2018, I still think it's an essential reading about network effect, marketing, and virality. This book was an easier-to-read version of the book "Linked" by Albert-László Barabási, a network theorist at Northeastern and Harvard. Linked was a mothership of everything about network science whereas the Viral Loop is the book about how the earlier startups implemented and executed this method. As I read this book 9 years later it was published, I would say this book is more like the history of the making of unicorn startups in the early 2000s-Facebook, Google, Hotmail, PayPal, Ebay etc. The first 70 pages were fascinating, raving about why and how these startups created such a viral million to billion users. Then it got a little bit of in the middle and then gave the punch at the end. All in all, I think this book is fundamentally profound. I highly recommend those who are interested in network science, marketing, and virality.
November 19, 2016
This book is a fun read if you want to hear the stories of a number of viral companies and products. However, if you want to learn how to create something viral of your own, you won't find it here. The writing is a bit boring and cliche; the tiny overviews of psychology and sociology are shallow and feel like padding; and while many of the "case studies" are classics and worth learning about, a few feel out of date and obsolete (e.g. the book touts Ning and Open Social as the next big thing).
But most importantly, the book is flawed, because a) it claims that virality gives you totally free growth, whereas the reality is that building virality into a product is not free and very tricky to do and b) it offers no insight as how to actually build that virality into a product. In short, despite some entertaining anecdotes, most of which have been retold in hundreds of other books and blog posts, this book is not worth reading.
But most importantly, the book is flawed, because a) it claims that virality gives you totally free growth, whereas the reality is that building virality into a product is not free and very tricky to do and b) it offers no insight as how to actually build that virality into a product. In short, despite some entertaining anecdotes, most of which have been retold in hundreds of other books and blog posts, this book is not worth reading.
November 6, 2017
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a history of events and companies that went viral? Is it a book about what causes things to go viral? Is it a book about challenges with online security? It's not clear.
The narrative doesn't flow too well either. The author starts something (E.g. how Facebook became viral), and concludes by diving deep into a completely different territory (E.g. how the information we put online creates different security risks), without really tying the two things together.
It's a fine read as a collection of stories about different viral phenomenon but don't expect to learn any fundamental knowledge from it.
The narrative doesn't flow too well either. The author starts something (E.g. how Facebook became viral), and concludes by diving deep into a completely different territory (E.g. how the information we put online creates different security risks), without really tying the two things together.
It's a fine read as a collection of stories about different viral phenomenon but don't expect to learn any fundamental knowledge from it.
April 20, 2018
This book introduced the evolution of our business model from traditional door to door selling to the explosive viral loop. Very informative. You get to know all the famous/ not so famous companies through the internet, the new business model is created, the price is we the consumers trade our privacy with our free-usage.
Specially we know about the privacy leakage on Facebook, still people don't seem to care about this, they hand in their own precious data, likes, dislikes to the targeted companies who would spend billions to just get your information.
This is an era of commercial battles all lies on line. Either your are connected and sold, or you are disconnected and safe.
Specially we know about the privacy leakage on Facebook, still people don't seem to care about this, they hand in their own precious data, likes, dislikes to the targeted companies who would spend billions to just get your information.
This is an era of commercial battles all lies on line. Either your are connected and sold, or you are disconnected and safe.
February 18, 2019
Very interesting account of the startup scene in the 90's and early 00's. Full of some great chapters about tech icons, iconic companies and how they came to spread virally. Should be required reading for anyone starting a startup. I picked it up as a recommendation from a startup class lecture (Alex Shultz) on growth.
Cons: One chapter drags on because unfortunately much of what it's trying to say is fairly obvious for anyone online in 2019. Despite this I think there is a lot of unnecessary emphasis on the social network Ning.
Cons: One chapter drags on because unfortunately much of what it's trying to say is fairly obvious for anyone online in 2019. Despite this I think there is a lot of unnecessary emphasis on the social network Ning.
February 12, 2020
Understanding virality is key to understanding platforms and network effects. The book doesn't offer much on how to create them but what the book does exceptionally well is give some great stories of early entrepreneurs who tried at creating viral networks. The most fascinating story was about Max Levchin and his path which lead him towards PayPal.
Picked for networks, continued reading for the untold stories.
Picked for networks, continued reading for the untold stories.
March 7, 2020
This book was like going back in time. It explains very well what is the ‘something’ that makes companies/products viral. Examples are made based on companies who took off between 1994-2008 i.e. Netscape, eBay, Hotmail, Flickr, MySpace, PayPal, Skype, Facebook etc. I remember using those products but I never thought at that time these are also startups. I simply considered them as a kind of standard because everyone was using these products. I would simply say ‘oh wow’.
July 19, 2017
Nice stories, no specific viral marketing advice
The book is a collection of interesting stories written in a way almost like fiction. So it makes for nice reading.
However, if you are looking for getting ideas on how to outdo your competion or even specifc recipes on how to make your online product viral, the book will not help you!
The book is a collection of interesting stories written in a way almost like fiction. So it makes for nice reading.
However, if you are looking for getting ideas on how to outdo your competion or even specifc recipes on how to make your online product viral, the book will not help you!
June 30, 2022
Carino, non mi aspettavo una cosa così. Mi aspettavo più una spiegazione su come funziona o su come avviare un viral loop affiancata a caso studi.
In realtà è un libro che illustra SOLO casi studi. Forse è perché non esiste ancora una formula della vitalità vera e propria?
Anche se è scritto in maniera scorrevole ho fatto fatica a finirlo.
In realtà è un libro che illustra SOLO casi studi. Forse è perché non esiste ancora una formula della vitalità vera e propria?
Anche se è scritto in maniera scorrevole ho fatto fatica a finirlo.
January 3, 2023
Really unfocused. Some great and well-told stories of company growth, but doesn't really stick to any specific or consistent analytical framework describing what led to successful growth, and many of the stories are now super-dated (e.g., Hot or Not is the first case study told). Lacking in focus, lacking in analytical rigor, but still interesting!
February 21, 2019
Good book with high-level examples, sporadic nuggets of inspirational stories of successes and failures of viral growth from the Pre 2010 era of the web-based companies and social networks. Would love to see an updated edition.
May 15, 2021
Interesting stories
The brief histories of some well known companies was interesting. There are a few good concepts briefly talked about but not explained. More of a background or entertainment read than a how-to.
The brief histories of some well known companies was interesting. There are a few good concepts briefly talked about but not explained. More of a background or entertainment read than a how-to.
April 28, 2022
I expected more of the science behind growth and “viral loops” but was more of a history of companies that experienced viral growth. Way too long and yet never quite deep enough on any one story for my liking.
November 7, 2023
Just does not hold up to the test of time. I tried to get through this book two times, but it just doesn’t hold any value now that all the all of the business examples have moved to different stage of their business lifespan.
February 4, 2025
I liked this book and think it worthy of a good skim. One thing is its nice as a history piece given they were speculating about Facebook hitting 200 million users which is....quaint. The author touches on a variety of companies and issues that I had not read before. All in all, decent book.
February 7, 2017
Could have been a great book at the time but now it is vastly outdated. You know it when the book mentions Twitter as an up & coming platform.
July 26, 2017
Fascinating read about some of the most disruptive companies to emerge over the last 15+ years!
June 19, 2018
Great book. A lot of real world examples.
July 28, 2018
Very well written and easy to read summary of the .coms and Silicon Valley top companies’ history. Just enough to scratch the surface and think to dig deeper.
August 13, 2018
Stories of how early viral internet (and not only) products got their traction. Ton of rare insights, exact numbers. No b/s. 100% real and very inspiring stories.
Reading it 2nd time now...
Reading it 2nd time now...
January 3, 2019
No actionable value and the viral coefficient calculation in the book is wrong - which for a book about virality is highly awkward and removes all credibility.
April 8, 2021
Great examples.
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