Virality is a myth (mostly)

In a recent interview on the Acquired podcast, Ben Thompson (author of Stratechery) shared this same finding from his personal experience:

“ The problem with a word-of-mouth business and exponential growth is people run out of people to talk to.  That’s the limiting factor. There’s a little bit of exponential with every new

We think that products often grow through friends telling friends, who tell more friends, and this cascades to so-called viral growth. It turns out this is almost never how products grow. Instead, products explode in popularity when someone (or a few someones) with a large platform shares the product with their audience.

When we see a product going “viral,” it’s very rarely driven by a many-to-many spread, but is instead the result of someone with a large audience broadcasting it (i.e. one-to-many).

Even though products don’t grow virally for long, it’s still absolutely worthwhile to optimize mechanisms of virality (e.g. word of mouth, invites, referrals, a remarkab