Every startup founder dreams about having explosive growth and every marketing and PR firm uses the “Viral, Buzz, Word of Mouth…” words to attract new clients. Many smart people out there have devised several techniques to do the trick, i.e to generate explosive growth.
There are many things like simplicity and ease of use, humane user treatment, free service and so on, that could force users to opt for your service instead of other such offerings. But amongst all these I have found “Free” to be the most powerful driving force behind a user’s decision. To understand this better lets dive into some viral growth case studies.
Hotmail:
Hotmail, which launched as a free web based email service in 1996, followed the advise of their investor Tim Draper (DFJ) and appended an advertising message to every outbound email: “Get your free email at Hotmail“. This turned every existing Hotmail user into a marketer and every email that he sent became a powerful marketing message as it was coming from a closed affiliate or friend. Who so ever read the message signed up for their own free email service and propelled the message even further. As a result Hotmail hit the 12 million user mark in just 1.5 years, signing 150,000 subscribers every day. Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million in 1998.
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