
Ways to Build Virality into Your Product - gaborcselle
https://medium.com/gabor/9-ways-to-build-virality-into-your-product-5975e1fe74e3
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ken
"Your product offers a differentiated type of messaging and encourages users
to invite their friends to join them on the new messaging platform." ...
"That’s the limitation of this strategy: If the messaging experience isn’t
actually better in-product than over SMS or email, users will just find it
annoying."

What kind of "differentiation" are they thinking of? I would pay good money to
_not_ have to deal with any (more) proprietary chat systems. They're _all_
annoying. "Download the app" and "Register here" are just synonyms for "Back"
and "Mark as spam".

There's a couple tech giants whose chat systems I use, only because I've got
friends and colleagues who use them. Unless your new chat system will get me a
job, or is the only way 1/3 of my friends will send messages online, I'm not
going to touch it.

I don't understand how we ended up with so many incompatible chat systems
today. Did we learn nothing from SMTP? Is XMPP not good enough? Are we so
petty that compatible communications are somehow an anathema?

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GuB-42
Examples of differentiation:

\- Signal end-to-end encryption

\- Discord game integration

\- Slack history keeping

\- Skype ability to make phone calls

\- Snapchat self destroying pictures

You may not see any use in any of these but some people do.

And some reasons why these aren't standardized:

\- it is hard to do without some form of centralization (ex: history keeping)

\- some services cost money (ex: phone calls)

\- some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable
histories)

\- owning a popular messaging network is simply too appealing

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colecut
It's funny that you mention slack's edge as history keeping, which is a
premium feature you need to pay for after a threshold... Skype and many others
will always keep all of your history for free

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raywu
I like the systematic breakdown. OP, what are some of your favorite viral
marketing case studies?

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Persuadem
Great article

