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A lot of successful web entrepreneurs say that viral growth of your idea is a great indicator of the success of the idea and where you're going. My question is: How can you measure how viral your idea is? For example, if we took the direct or referral traffic you receive over a time slot, how should the curve look like? Is it important to have the shape of an exponential function? Or the traffic can be increase in a linear fashion and still be considered viral? Any systematic methodologies to measure that? |
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First you need to define what your Key Performance indicators (KPIs) are for your idea. It is different for every business. It could be revenue, customers, traffic, transactions, etc. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator to learn more. Sometimes looking at what your competition are reporting as their KPIs helps. It is important that a KPI has an element of normalization to account for daily fluctuations. E.g. 1-day actives on a site is a horrible KPI because the standard deviation is high, however 7-day or 30-day actives is a better indicator. Regarding growth. The gradient needs to be positive. The higher the gradient the better, and if it is increasing that is a great sign. |
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A viral product is one that gets better as more people subscribe. A social network, for example, has the potential to grow virally because each user will benefit from the addition of another user. MSN or Google Chat are the same way. I get no benefit from 0 users but a lot when all of my friends are on there. In order to make your idea grow virally, make sure that your idea has a focus that is outwardly focused - the benefit comes from the site itself growing. The beauty in this is that you can take idea that's not inherently viral and make it so. Other things can be immensely popular, but not viral. Pandora, for example, is a very famous music website. For the most part, it is not a viral product. Pandora will have good music for me, whether or not more users come on to the site. To make a product viral, I think you need two things:
With those two, and maybe a few small tweaks here and there, I think anybody can build a viral product. I've see some great ideas that had a lot of potential to become viral, not grow at all. On the other hand, I've seen products that had no way of growing virally, grow virally due to a good execution. |
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You should study some management and entrepreneurial books. They will get you the best answer you can get. Oferte cazare Busteni |
