The secret sauce in creating a product or service that has the potential to go viral is adding something that creates more value when more people in the user’s network use or adopt it. This is known as the network effect.
Facebook understood the network effect concept very well. If you are the only person in your network of friends with a Facebook account, well Facebook is pretty useless. Facebook’s customer-facing value proposition is its ability to peek into the lives of people in your close (and not so close) network. The larger the network, the more value it has to you as a user.
I’d like to share a few examples of products where I used my personal network connections to help the product go viral.
