A few years later, the email app Mailbox launched with a similar strategy. An incredibly compelling—albeit a tad more professional—demo video racked up one hundred thousand views in less than four hours. This one-minute video, combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list,

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.

Holstee Manifesto, an

According to Bain & Company, a 10 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company. And according to Market Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, while to a new prospect it’s just 5 to 20 percent.

The growth hacker has a response: Well, why should customers do that? Have you actually made it easy for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth talking about?

According to Bain & Company, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company.

Did the founders expect it to go viral and launch their company in front of many new customers? No, but because it was inspiring, moving, directed at a specific audience, and concise, it had a far better chance of doing so than the countless boring and meaningless mission statements written by other companies each and every day.

All of which is to say a simple fact: if you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product and the experience.

BitTorrent