Viral Marketing Scaling to Million and Beyond

I am at Community Next at Sunnyvale, one of the best

Sitting at a panel session “Online Communities To a Million and Beyond”

Joe Greenstein of Flixter, Jim Squires of Ning, Ramu Yalamanchi of hi5, Jonathan Abrams of Socialilz (earlier founder of Friendster), moderated by Dave Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures.

1. The repeat theme of the day has been to know your users – product-market match.

- Know your target user, whats the emotional element if why they use your product.
- Your product has to be really good, provide value to users. For viral play it needs to have a viral element as part of the product, not forced send-to-friend emails.
- Get your ideas to market, feel the response, users may use it differently, different type of users may adopt it. Listen and adopt.

This topic is dear to my heart because I have been hearing lot of talk about “getting users” or getting a “facebook strategy” etc, which turns me off. Real marketing is about building a relationship of trust with your user. So viral is a tool, so hearing thus know your user is heart warming go me.

2. Is Hiring and Virality Inversely Proportional – How to Hire Teams to Make Viral Happen

Jon of Socializr shares his experience saying its not by super resumes, because he had the experience of firing bad performers in a past startup Friendster, who got hired as VPs because of Friendster’s brand name.
His advice is to hire really hungry people and give them a chance.

3. Invite-Onlys is thats a good idea to create viral play.

Friendster had an open site, then closed it to fix bugs and opened it again. Ramu of Hi5 says they did a live beta where they fixed bugs and responded to market, they did not do an invite-only beta. Everyone agrees

4. Scaling Issues of viral user play

Jim squires of Ning says Spam was the number 1 issue and had to build controls to keep their site usable for real users.

5. Money needed to build a real good growing site

Jonathan says $500K is enough to build, test and figure out if its viable.
Ramu says he got $250K and ran for 2 years and says being frugal in early days teaches fiscal discipline which helps once you scale.
Joe of Flixter has build with raising $30K only.