LATEST ENTRY

LINKS | Noah Brier

The Viral Non-Strategy

November 29, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 1 COMMENTS

Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital hits the nail on the head with his latest post about the "viral strategy" of startups:

Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning...and it's harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.

A few points on this: First, I'd add that virality is also partly by chance. Second, it drives me crazy when I hear/read about entrepreneurs talking about the product as if it's the only thing that matters. Sure it's important, but if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear ...

via tedr // Tags: marketing, startups


PREVIOUS ENTRY | NEXT ENTRY

LEAVE A COMMENT

First name, first and last, whatever you feel like.

Required, but not displayed (so don't worry about spam).

If you've got one, flaunt it.

You can use some HTML (a's, br's, p's, oh my!) if you'd like, if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.
REMEMBER ME?

COMMENTS

1Ryan Waggoner

Agree on the frustration with entrepreneurs. I think when it comes to our brilliant ideas, it's hard for us to realize that *no one else cares*. Launching a great product and having zero impact is a good way to learn the lesson that things like virality, SEO, marketing, sales, etc. matter.

November 30, 2009