How do I balance user satisfaction versus virality?

Originally asked on Quora. If you find yourself mostly thinking about balancing satisfaction versus virality, you’re probably doing it wrong. The Quora question is a false dilemma, because it asks you to choose between satisfaction and virality, and then quantifying the tradeoff. Most of the time, if you’re working on naturally viral products, you spend most of your time elsewhere. The world of product decisions is more like:

That is, you have features in your product that either drive growth or don’t, and you have features in your product that either really help the value proposition, or don’t. These are actually pretty independent factors and you can build product features that hit each different quadrant. For example, if you are building a product like Skype, finding your friends and sending invites is clearly a high value prop, high virality action. After all, you can’t use Skype by yourself. But if you take the exact same feature, and try to bolt it onto a non-viral product like, say, a travel search engine, then you’re just creating spam. There’s really no great reason to “find friends” in a travel product, though it might be useful to share your itinerary. A feature that’s high-value in one product is spam in the other. And if you think about each quadrant, you get something like this: Let’s talk about each bucket:

Awesome features grow your product and also people love them. The Skype “find friends” feature is a great one, but so is Quora’s “share to Twitter” feature. After I write this post, I want people to comment and upvote, so something that lets me publish to my audience, which is both viral and part of the value prop is awesome.
Do it anyway features are just the core of your UX. Writing on walls on Facebook may not be inherently viral in themselves, but it’s important to the product experience, keeps people coming back, and indirectly helps drive the virality of the product. The more people you have coming back, the more changes you have for them to create content or invite people
Spam features are high virality actions that your users don’t really want to do, and don’t add to the product value prop. I think this is the bucket that the tradeoff lives of a question like, “should I be viral, or offer a great product?” If you are spending a lot of time in this quadrant, then you are shaky ground.
WTF needs no explanation

Ideally, you want to pick a proven product category that’s naturally viral and high-retention, for instance communication, publishing, payments, photos, etc. – and then spend as much time building awesome features that both drive growth and also make your users happy. Stay away from spam features as much as you can, or use them sparingly lest your product becomes spam.

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http://www.goke.me/ Goke Jnr

Awesome piece here Andrew. Leaves me thinking; how do you think this translates in eCommerce store environments. What type of ‘viral’ features can I provide to my visitors to drastically improve their experience on my store? Things that come to mind immediately as awesome include:

- Giving them the ability to share the products they purchased on social networks after they complete checkout.
- Developing Facebook open graph actions for when they are ‘viewing’ a product and then when they ‘buy’ the product (finding it difficult to believe no one has done that yet) ref. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/.
- Microdata for publishing reviews (and their reviewers) of products on search engine results.
- The ability to have a ‘discussion’ (not review) about a certain product on social networks and have a ‘Social Proxy’ aggregate all the comments, likes, mentions etc. of that product (kind of like what the Social plugin for WordPress (http://mailchimp.com/social-plugin-for-wordpress/) does but this time for shared products.

But in your opinion, how can these be classified into awesome, do it anyway or spam? Just picking your brain here :)
Demetri Mouratis

Excellent post Andrew and incredibly timely. You call out photos as naturally viral and high-retention. What are some awesome features we may have missed in this space?
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

For the most part, ecommerce products aren’t viral. They are similar to sites like travel, review sites, etc., which depend mostly on SEM/SEO to acquire traffic.

The reason is simple: Almost everything that depends on post-purchase virality is bound to hit the <1% transaction bottleneck, so that very few people on your site will ever do anything.

The new innovators in the space, like Pinterest, are companies that have a lot of sharing (like, "I want this!") without requiring purchase. They aren't quite straight up ecommerce sites, but are adjacent enough that they're interesting.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Above my pay grade :) It’s hard to talk specifics without me really understanding your product and the context of your users. I bet the best product people at your company probably have a lot of ideas here.
http://petegrif.tumblr.com/ Pete Griffiths

Imho the reason that Pinterest got off the ground so quickly was that it offered value to the user as an individual. Pinning things on a board, for personal use, with no intention of sharing them, is nonetheless a meaningful and useful activity so if the site does a good job of it, it is high value. I strongly suspect Pinterest got off the ground without requiring or leveraging a pronounced network effect. I suspect that the SN aspect came later.

(If I remember correctly you wrote something about this a while ago)
http://www.twitter.com/aainslie Alexander Ainslie (@AAinslie)

“#AdjacentCommerce” as a new eCommerce sector. Interesting. As always Andrew, a thought provoking post.
http://twitter.com/zapreneur zapreneur.com

This post has helped me clarify something I have been thinking about. Viral = build awareness of the product. In other words, grow the audience with viral like content, but have a solid value proposition when the audience arrives. When I get this right in the real world, I will let you know.
Lilia Tovbin

It’s not just photos, any content benefits from images be it site pages or Facebook posts draw and hold users attention. Users stay on pages with images longer – things like icons, thumbnails and slideshows help with engagement metrics.
Lilia Tovbin

Great point on the transaction bottleneck Andrew – it’s what makes interpreting any results from improving purchase funnels challenging – not easy to reach statistical significance to conclude with confidence that something worked or didn’t.
Here are some ideas for ecommerce:
1. Retail. Sending promo codes and friends & family discounts to your existing customers. Any promo “for first time customers only” will bring in new customers, others could improve loyalty and customer LTV
2. Subscriptions. Offering some benefit for your loyal customers for inviting their friends to try out the product, might work best when you have some “credits” to offer towards buying upgrades. Alternatively, offer an appealing promo for users referred to by your customers only (not publicly available coupon code), might work best when there is some free introductory period where users commit to your product by entering some info, data so they are likely to convert to paying customers.
Disclaimer: Easier said than done, requires programming work to setup options to redeem either a code or a referral-based promo.
Lilia Tovbin

Great post and visualization Andrew. I think the phrase “when developing a product” makes the question legit, because founders have to balance value prop for existing customers Vs. reaching new customers while figuring out what the “core” (ideally paying) customer group prefers. If existing customers are early adopters of a freemium product with low conversion to pay it might be a matter of survival for a business to upset some of the users only using free features, if it helps bring in new customers who pay, in order to be able to invest into product development. It’s not just about doing the right thing for customers, but also doing the right thing for a business.
http://abdallahalhakim.tumblr.com/ Abdallah Al-Hakim

I have been noticing that many of the companies in beta phase try to get you to advertise their product (to go viral) by promising earlier access to the invitation. They even break it down by each social network so that the more network you promote it on, the more points you get and the faster you get access. I thought that was clever since most people applying to beta version are probably interested and don’t mind sharing this information to their followers/friends on social media.

@andrewchen