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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

November, 2009

The Viral Non-Strategy

Virality is not a given, but something that must be engineered and cannot be relied upon solely to drive the success of a product.
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 ...
November 29, 2009
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.