

VC's Billion-Dollar Secrets - ideas101
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/entretech/2007/06/01/google-amazon-ebay-ent-tech-cx_eb_0601everythingventured.html

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kul
the other good thing about 'viral' startups, is that you get instant feedback
about whether something works; you don't have to hang around to see if people
like it or will use it.

Max Levchin told me that he would never bother with a start-up that wasn't
viral in some way for this same reason.

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aston
If your product is inherently viral, but isn't taking off, does that mean it's
a bad idea? Or just that it hasn't tipped yet?

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nostrademons
Probably means you're missing some critical usability feature, i.e. you're not
solving the whole problem. Few ideas are all bad or all good, and things
rarely tip all by themselves. But people don't use a product unless it solves
their whole problem without making them hunt for missing pieces - that's
really the difference between "project" and "product". If you're missing a
piece, it'll never get off the ground.

The missing pieces are usually pretty subtle too - FaceBook took off largely
because it was explicitly designed around existing physical social networks,
like colleges. Many other people had done similar sites years earlier, but
they always focused on building a social network out of thin ether, rather
than leveraging offline social contacts.

