How to Make Your Startup Go Viral (And Why This Article Won’t)

“Holy s#!t!” I overheard one of my students exclaim to another as they were waiting for class to begin. “Check this out!”

“What?” asked the second student.

The first student angled her water bottle toward her friend and said, “I put ice cubes in my new water bottle last night, and they’re still here. They haven’t melted yet.”

“Really?” asked the second student. “That’s crazy. What kind of water bottle is it?”

“It’s called a Hydro Flask,” the first student replied. “I bought it last week because my friend has one and he loves it. Now I’m starting to see why.”

“Cool,” said the second student. “I need a new water bottle. Maybe I’ll get one of those, too!”

“Viral marketing in action!” I interjected from the front of the classroom.

Both students look up, confused, and possibly a little annoyed I’d been listening to their conversation. “What do you mean?” asked the student with the water bottle.

“Sorry for eavesdropping.” I clarified. “But your conversation was just such a great example of marketing that I couldn’t help myself.”

“Marketing?” said the second student. “How was it a form of marketing? We were just having a conversation. The company can’t control what we talk about.”

“Of course they can,” I replied. “It’s viral marketing!”

A powerfully contagious opportunity

As consumers — which most of us are, most of the time —?we rarely think about how we discover the products we ultimately decide to use. Because of this,?when we become entrepreneurs, we tend to overlook the importance of discoverability in the ultimate success (or failure) of the things we create.?But discoverability is critical to every company’s eventual outcome.

Discovery is usually the purview of marketing departments and traditional marketing strategies. Those strategies include things like paid advertisements, press and PR, search engine optimization, content dissemination, growth hacking, and any number of other approaches for creating brand and product awareness. However, not all marketing comes from marketing teams.

Clever entrepreneurs understand that they can build marketing directly into their products and the things they create.?The result is viral marketing. Viral marketing is when word about a product, service, or piece of content spreads on its own.?It’s perhaps the most powerful form of marketing on the planet because the promotion comes organically from people who aren’t being compensated for saying anything.?It’s also the hardest marketing strategy to successfully execute.

Virality versus word-of-mouth

Before explaining how to create virality, I need to take a moment to distinguish it from a similar concept, which is word-of-mouth marketing. Lots of people conflate the two things, but they’re not the same.

Word-of-mouth marketing is inherently selfish.?It’s a byproduct of people telling other people about something because having more people use it is a way of helping themselves.?For example, if I’m the only person with a LinkedIn account, my LinkedIn account is useless.?LinkedIn doesn’t become useful until lots of other people are using it.?As a result, it’s in my best interest to tell other people about LinkedIn so they start using it, too, and, in the process, LinkedIn becomes more valuable to me.

That’s word-of-mouth marketing. It’s also a powerful type of marketing, but the selfishness inherent in word-of-mouth marketing makes it not quite as powerful as virality.

Why virality is more powerful than word-of-mouth

In contrast to word-of-mouth marketing,?virality is the byproduct of people sharing something merely because they want to be associated with it.?They want to show it off or show that they know about it or own it or are in some meaningful way connected with it.?That connection creates value for them. Yes, it’s technically still a selfish reason, but the selfishness is minor. It’s more vanity than anything else.

Take, for example, the conversation I overheard between my students discussing one of their Hydro Flasks. It’s a great example of how virality was built into the product. To understand why it’s powerful, think about a water bottle from a consumer’s perspective.

When shopping for new water bottles, how many consumers are actively looking for something capable of keeping ice cubes frozen for 24 hours? Very few — if any — right? In this sense, “keeps ice cubes frozen for 24 hours” isn’t a valuable feature. Consumers aren’t asking for it, so why would a company worry about including it?

However, in the case of the Hydro Flask,?the ability to keep ice frozen for an extended period of time is?valuable because it’s an inherently viral feature.?It’s the kind of feature that, while limited in terms of practical value, encourages people to brag about and/or show-off a product to others.?This type of sharing inherently creates desirability.?In the minds of consumers, we can’t help but think, “If this person I know believes something is so important it’s worth talking about, it must be worth knowing about.”

Give customers something to talk about

To be clear, getting people to talk about your product is more of an art than a an easily executable marketing strategy.?For one thing, no matter what you create, you can never guarantee people will want to talk about it.?For example, the water bottle I use — not a Hydro Flask — keeps ice cubes frozen for more than 24 hours, and yet I’ve never mentioned it to anyone.

However, while you can’t guarantee people will talk about your product, certain strategies make it more likely.?Specifically,?if you want to achieve viral growth, then you should think about ways of incorporating what might best be described as “holy s#!t” moments.?These are the types of moments when consumers are engaging with a product or service or piece of content and think, “holy s#!t… I’ve got to tell someone.”

Obvious examples of creating “holy s#!t” moments are when products do exactly what they’re supposed to do in exceptional ways.?The Hydro Flask is a good example. It’s so good at insulating liquids it can keep ice frozen for more than a day!

Worth noting, while these types of “holy s#!t” moments — the moments where the product is better than expected — are powerful moments, they’re also the hardest types of moments to achieve. Simply put, doing the thing your product, service, or content is supposed to do at an exceptionally high level is difficult because your users already have relatively fixed expectations for what they’re going to receive.

Surpassing pre-established user expectations is challenging.?It’s why nobody ever tells their friends: “Holy s#!t… I was at McDonald’s yesterday and had the most delicious Big Mac.” It’s also why this article won’t go viral. Sure, the fact that you’ve read this far means you clearly think it’s interesting, but — let’s face it — this article isn’t going to blow anyone’s mind. It’s merely delivering on the promise of its title. (However, if you feel like proving me wrong, you’re more than welcome to share it with everyone you know.)

An alternate strategy for achieving virality

While exceeding consumer expectations about the direct value or benefit of what you’ve created is challenging, it’s also not the only way to achieve virality. Rather than being exceptional at doing whatever it is your product is supposed to do, I often encourage entrepreneurs to figure out how they can do something exceptionally well that’s orthogonal to their core value proposition.

To return to the McDonald’s example, sure, nobody ever walks out of a McDonald’s saying “I had the most delicious Big Mac,” but they might walk out of McDonald’s saying, “That was the cleanest McDonald’s restroom I’ve ever been in.” While a sparkling-clean McDonald’s toilet seat surely isn’t the end goal of every McDonald’s franchise owner, if it gets people talking about McDonald’s, then maybe it should be.

To understand why, think about the opposite version of a clean McDonald’s restroom: a filthy McDonald’s restroom. Even though having a filthy restroom might not seem like a good thing, if it’s filthy enough that people talk about it, at least it means people are… well… talking about it. Strange as it might seem, that’s still a good thing. It means people are talking about McDonald’s, which is free marketing.

To be clear, I’m not encouraging you to create something so bad people want to talk about it because of how terrible it is. But I’m also not telling you not to do that. It’s certainly a strategy great marketers have successfully leveraged. (For some examples, read?Ryan Holiday’s insightful book?Trust Me, I’m Lying).

The point is, for virality, quality isn’t what matters most.?What matters most is that you give people a reason to talk about your product, service, or content.?If you can figure out how to get people talking on their own, you’ll have mastered the art of leveraging the most powerful and effective form of marketing in the world.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on?Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on?Twitter?or subscribe to?Web Masters,?his podcast exploring digital entrepreneurship.