
PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail - terpua
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-free-email-at-hotmail/
======
fawreader
This story gets it backward. Jack Smith came up with that idea. Sabeer Bhatia
makes this explicitly clear in _Founders At Work_.

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.

 _Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email
recipients to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with
this?

Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to
make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very
careful. You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of
violating the sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it
that says “This message has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at
hotmail.com.” So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We
don’t want to be perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And
he said, “Absolutely, you should do it.” And the next thing we know, he claims
that this idea was his. He’s given a number of interviews literally claiming
that he was the father of web-based email — without him it would not have
happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken credit for everything — including
the tagline (which later became known as the classic example of viral
marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences, which I don’t think is
right.

Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?

Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and
that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do
web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do web-
based email?_

~~~
pg
That was apparently false:

[http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2009/02/a-note-about-
sa...](http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2009/02/a-note-about-sabeer-
bhatias-interview.html)

~~~
fawreader
Without any more information, there's no reason to believe that the
unspecified evidence was more reliable than Sabeer.

A) Who was the source of the evidence? How many people were even there in the
room? What does Jack Smith say?

B) As for the disparaging, unless the evidence was all the other VCs that
Sabeer talked to, it sounds like the source of both these claims was DFJ
saying "nuh-uh!" What else would you expect Tim Draper to say, "yeah, I
badmouthed them and stole credit"? Based on their other behavior, which
scenario seems more plausible?

"An anonymous source denies Bhatia's claims" is not very solid evidence.

------
kylec
They still do this, too. I got an email from someone using Hotmail a few days
ago and this was appended to the bottom:

    
    
        Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now. 
        Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now. 
        Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now. 
        Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. Sign up now. 
        Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
    

I kid you not, 5 lines. Something tells me that they're getting desperate.

~~~
sutro
I just got an email from a Hotmail user too. The tagline was:

    
    
      Hotmail: P.S. I love you. Get free email at hotmail.com.
      Hotmail: I tell you I love you and your response is to move me to your spam folder? 
      That really hurts. 
      Hotmail: I saw you with someone else last night. Who was that?
      Hotmail: I just want to make you happy. Please respond. 
      Hotmail: Can't we go back to the way we were? Weren't we happy then? 
      Hotmail: I've infected your computer with a remotely-controlled bot and will be 
      deleting your hard drive if you don't respond in the next 5 minutes. 
      Hotmail: You won't be able to read this for a while, as your current computer has 
      been permanently disabled, but when do you get back online, I just want you to know...
      Windows Live Hotmail has powerful SPAM protection.

------
dstorrs
Ok, so "the power of viral loops" basically amounts to:

1) Spend time and effort build your product 2) Give it away for free 3) Embed
a tagline into the product so that users are "involuntary salespeople" 4) ???
5) Profit!

There isn't really anything new here. Applying viral marketing is trivially
easy for email, or other social-media apps (which is not to say it will work,
just that's it's a natural fit). What I would like to see is an analysis on
how to adapt viral loops to non-social settings. How would someone like
LifeLock.com apply this message, for example?

~~~
vlad
If you think it's easier, switch your idea. Everything is easy and obvious
after the fact; e.g. The Pythogarean Theorem. For anything that can be easily
explained in a few minutes of class or blog post, it took years for the
brightest of scientists, mathematicians, or inventors to come up with.

~~~
dstorrs
I think it's easier to do _viral marketing_ for products that you give away.
But it's a lot easier to make money off of things that you charge for.

------
Nwallins
> The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book

N.B. The journalist who exposed Steven Glass --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Penenberg>

------
Shamiq
For the business in this crowd:

Does this approach yield similar results for you? I could imagine iPhone
applications spreading this way (much like those damn Facebook quizzes), but
what about for more specialized markets?

~~~
sachinag
It only works if the product is great. There are a few rocket ships that are
great products that have grown with word of mouth that don't have the
structural virality (as with Facebook quizzes or the Hotmail footer) - Mint
and Dropbox immediately come to mind. Google, as well, if you go back a few
years.

~~~
jfarmer
Not necessaryily true. Mike Speiser wrote a great article about people who
"hack traction" by designing aggressive/spammy viral loops:
[http://gigaom.com/2009/06/07/hacking-traction-the-dark-
side-...](http://gigaom.com/2009/06/07/hacking-traction-the-dark-side-of-
marketing-optimization/)

It depends on your definition of "works," I suppose. The above "works" for
Tagged, but I imagine most people on HN would say that that isn't "working" --
it's spamming.

The best kind, obviously, is the sort people like Seth Godin write about,
where people are so passionate that they are actively seeking to spread your
product.

Unfortunately it's often easier to fall to the dark side ("easier, more
seductive") and spend time optimizing your viral loop than building a product
your customers are excited about.

------
tomjen2
As smart as it was, I have yet to find some software that adds tags to the
messages that I don't hate. Mostly because the kind of software that does
stuff like that isn't the kind of software I would want to use - but it is
pushed on me anyway.

Even the mail stuff in my Ipod Touch does that by default (I turned it off,
but but that isn't going to do much for the stuff I receive).

