What has a pandemic to do with marketing?

What is a pandemic?

Many of us learned the word Pandemic for the first time thanks to coronavirus and COVID-19. Pandemic is an outbreak of disease prevalent over the whole world. The H1N1 flu virus in 2009 is a good example of that. By contrast, the famous SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in 2003 was an epidemic spread in Hong Kong and surrounding Cantonese regions. Similarly, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was considered an epidemic. The difference between a pandemic and epidemic is the size of its impact. Despite that, both words refer to an illness of similar nature and derived from a common source, in excess of what would be normally expected in a community or region.

A map of the coronavirus outbreak as of March 2020

How does "virality" look like?

Coronavirus is shutting the whole world down because it spreads more easily than other diseases. Because of that, we see the exponential growth in confirmed cases on COVID-19 when not enough measure was in place to stop the spread.

To us marketers, viral growth is a more familiar term. Virality typically refers to the tendency of an image, video, or a piece of content to be circulated rapidly and widely from one internet or mobile user to another. Viral marketing is one of the most promising channels to grow product adoption and product usage organically. 

Hockey stick growth of COVID-19

TikTok is a great example of viral-content-enabled hockey stick growth. SensorTower reported over 700 million global downloads of TikTok, beating Facebook & Instagram in 2019.

The same hockey-stick growth seen on TikTok

How to measure virality?

There is a way to calculate the virus’s basic reproduction number, or R0 — the number of people on average one infected person will pass the virus to.  Coronavirus suggests a range of 2–2.5 in R0,  exceeding seasonal flu in the range of 1-2. 

R0 (Basic reproduction number) comparison on Coronavirus

There is a similar metric to R0 in viral marketing called K-factor. The K-factor can be used to describe the growth rate of websites, apps, or a customer base. The formula is roughly as follows:

 (e.g. if each new customer invites five friends, i = 5)
 (e.g. if one in five invitees convert to new users, c = .2)

In the example above your K-factor is 1. The higher the K-factor, the higher the virality and the faster the product will grow in downloads or installs. Notice here I didn't say userbase instead - the reason being that active user base also highly depends on the effectiveness of user onboarding and retention, which we can cover in a different post.

2019 Q4 global downloads of the top social apps

Why is viral marketing so desirable?

First of all, viral marketing is powerful because it is implemented through content and enabled via technology in today's products. This makes it scalable.

Secondly, viral marketing success isn't limited to the size of your marketing budget as its outcome doesn't necessarily correlate to the amount of acquisition dollar put behind your campaigns and the spread of the content could be completely free or just slightly incentivized. Therefore it is more affordable.  

Using TikTok as an example, they focused on short-form mobile videos. By providing users with tools to make impactful visual and sound effects, TikTok enables its users to easily create viral content. TikTok further makes it easy to share their videos on other social platforms with TikTok signature look and feel - Douyin, TikTok's Chinese version also includes a sound signature in each video. When users share TikTok content, they are building mindshare in their community about the TikTok brand. With more and more social influencers getting onto the platform, their fans follower their footsteps to adopt the app.  What a powerful way to grow a product!

Final words

Now that you've learned that every person who contracted COVID-19, with or even without symptoms, may pass the virus on to two or more people,  are you finding yourself better at keeping social distance, washing hands often and not touching your face?

Are you interested in learning more about viral marketing? Is viral marketing for everyone? How to construct a successful viral marketing strategy? How to measure k-factor if your budget doesn't allow you to pay for those expensive attribution tools? Let me know if you're interested in learning more and I will follow up with more posts on this topic!

Read my related growth hacking articles:

Try Out Beets, Because It Will Make You Red Pee

Test Improved Conversion over Control by 20%. Deploy? Think Twice.

Why You Should Ignore Everything You Have Been Told About Growth Tactics

Try Out Beet, Because it'll Make You Red Pee

The Red Pee Proposition

Most parents have had the challenge of convincing their kids to eat vegetables.

"Try some brocolie, honey. It's good for you." 

"Why?'" 

"Because it's healthy. It gives you lots of vitamins and fiber." 

" No, thanks." (Looking away)  

This conversation I had with my kindergartener yesterday wasn't so typical.

"What is this red food?"

" It's called beet and it makes you red pee tomorrow if you eat enough."

"How many is enough?" 

"20 little pieces, I guess." 

"One, two, three... I got twenty!" (Chewing) 

Get Inside of Your Audience's Mind

Much of a Product Manager’s responsibility is to juggle multiple streams of conversation and move them towards closure. As a PM, you're required to influence and sell on a daily basis, to different audiences. During a good portion of your day, you make data-driven decisions (hopefully) with your left brain. Is it good to extend that capacity and sell with evidence or on the technicality side of the story? 

It depends. 

To an engineering audience, it may very well be the best way to go about it.  At the meantime, you'd better be prepared to sharpen up your right brain in order to take on an audience made up of sales, design or anyone new to the technology or concept you introduce on. 

How to Talk Tech to Non-Technical Audience

Live like an adult and think like a child - If you want to convince a child, you first learn how a child thinks.

The focus of the left brain is verbal, processing information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole. The right brain of the brain focuses on the visual, and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details. Left brain thinking is verbal and analytical. The right brain is non-verbal and intuitive, using pictures rather than words. 

Left brained organization such as Amazon invented non-powerpoint presentation and evangelizes the beauty of 6 pagers. If you want to work at Amazon, be sure to brush up on AB testing, market sizing questions and learn how to write hypothetical product's press release and FAQ announcement. Amazon uses this "working backwards" approach because it forces the team to get the most difficult discussions out of the way early. They need to fully understand what the product's value proposition will be and how it will be pitched to customers. If the team can't come up with a compelling press release, the product probably isn't worth making. 

Case Study: Tell a Technical Story in the Language of your Audience

R2D3 is an experiment in expressing statistical thinking with interactive design. Using a data set about homes, they created a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco. This is the most powerful visual storytelling I've come across recently. How elegant!

SCROLL

Immerse yourself in the data story

This is part 2 of story telling series. Find part 1 there.

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Today Was A Complete Waste Of Makeup

An idea is a terrible thing to waste. As harsh as it may sound, the quality of the idea is not as important as the quality of the presentation of that idea.

Show, Don't Just Tell - The Power of Story Telling

A couple years ago I was at a workshop of James Whittaker where he was teaching stage presence and story telling at an internal Microsoft forum. James is a distinguished engineer, an accomplished public speaker and the author of popular article Why I left Google. I enjoyed every minute of his stories and believe that following his five laws of stage presence, I'll master that magical super power of story telling. 

The Art of Stage Presence—James WhittakerDocs.com

5 Laws of stage presence by James Whittaker

• Start Strong

• Focus on the concept

• Show, don't tell

• Speak for the Audience

• Stick the landing

So why it has anything to do with the waste of makeup? 

The 6th law

• Tell a story by pumping up audience's imagination

James shared a interesting moment when he ran into a strange grumpy lady who apparently had a long daunting day. She said nothing more than 

"Today was a complete waste of makeup."

She shared a story by not sharing one, but you, in the audience, are simply intrigued. Including James.

Six word story

Inspired by Hemingway’s famous six-word tale, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” the “six word story” has served as a prompt for decades, testing writers’ ability to create their own succinct masterpieces with all sorts of clever results, including the popular 2006 Six Word Memoirs project. Now, the well-worn idea has gotten new life on Tumblr and Reddit, where users are posting their own hyper-short creations online to show off their creativity and pithiness.

• Birth certificate. Death certificate. Same Day.

• We're lying in bed. She's lying.

• "Total media blackout" agreed the President.

• BREAKING: Simulated beings realize they're simulated.

• "Wrong number", says a familiar voice.

• Sorry soldier, shoes sold in pairs. 

•  Brought rose home. Key didn't fit. 

• "Male?""It's an old driver's license."  

•  Introduced myself to mother again today.

•  I'm done being your "sometimes". 

• "Joining the President is his husband..." 

•  I met my soulmate. She didn't. 

•  Mom taught me how to shave. 

•  Passengers, this isn't your captain speaking. 

•  What's your return policy on rings?

Now it's my turn to share two of my 6 word stories today - Story telling is a super power. May the power be with you. 

Now investor pitching, a different story.


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How many nightmares have you ever had in your life?

Market Sizing Question & How to explain things to a kid

My 6-year-old woke up this morning and asked me a question: How many nightmares have you had in your whole life, Mommy? 

Sounds familiar? If not, then how about estimate number of shampoos used in the US each year or how many gas stations there are in San Francisco Bay Area, or one of these. And isn't it more exciting now you have to answer that in a way a kindergartner can follow? Okay, let's leave MECE out for a second and see what else we can do here.

"We'll find that out together, shall we? First, let's agree on a couple small things. We'll count the nightmares by night. If I wake up in the mid of the night from a nightmare and fall back asleep and this nightmare continued, it count as one. Yes?"

Nod.

"As long as I think it's a nightmare, even if it's not scary to you, it still counts. Yes?"

Nod. 

Great! Now let's chop up all my years into three blocks: 

1. When I was a kid, I was a happy kids just like you. I didn't have that many nightmares until I was a teenager. So until 12 let's say I had a nightmare only every 6 months, that makes it? Yes, Number A. 

2. As a teenager, I was scared of frogs and roller coasters, in addition to a few movies such as a scientist turned himself into a fly. So between 13 and 18, for every 20 dreams I had one nightmare. How do I calculate that? With some hustling we got to the Number B. 

3. In my adulthood I've learned how to rationalize scary scenes from ghost movies and cope with real life stress. I've been able to reduce on how often I have nightmares by 2/3. How much is that for the next 15 years? Number C.

OMG we have just one step left to do, adding them all up A+B+C. Ta-da - you got your answer!

Apparently I daydreamed about the second half of the conversation - Of course my kindergartner rambled away when I was just half way into teenager nightmare calculation, but I'm sure you could tell the steps I followed in solving a market sizing question. 
Step 1: Clarify the question and agree on assumptions.
Step 2: Break it down (ideally in a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) manner).
Step 3: Solve each piece.
Step 4: Consolidate the result.

I hope you will never have any nightmare about interviews, or at least market sizing questions after reading this post. 

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Y Combinator is a Waste of Time - Unless You Do This

Tips & lessons shared by an ex-YC founder, for those of you applying or thinking of applying for YC S17

Steli Efti is the founder & CEO of close.io,  a SaaS solution that helps people to close more deals.  As a YC W11 alumni, he is letting you in for a peek behind the curtain. In his own words.

Is Y Combinator worth it? It’s funny: You can ask two totally different YC alumni that question and get two totally different answers, even if they both attended the same batch.

How’s that possible? Why is it that? For some startups, Y Combinator makes a difference; while for others it makes all the difference? Trust me: It’s not coincidence, luck, or privilege.

I’d know: At Close.io, we owe a huge part of our success to Y Combinator. The lessons learned, resources gained, and relationships built during YC W11 were instrumental in both our initial traction and our continued growth.
So yeah, if you ask me, Y Combinator’s worth it—if you take the right approach. Because at the end of the day, thriving in the YC environment isn’t about having the best idea, the most disruptive product, or the smartest team. It’s all about having the right attitude.
More than any other factor, your mindset determines how much value you take away from the YC experience. If you’re willing to invest the (substantial) time and energy required for Y Combinator, you owe it to yourself to take an extra 10 minutes to read this article and make sure you’re setting yourself up for success.

The YC mentality: Academics  vs. Hustlers

I’ve been a part of multiple Y Combinator batches. Once as an attendee, other times as a speaker or advisor. And every time, I was fascinated by the stark divide between attitudes.
In every batch, there are two clearly-defined startup “camps”: The Academics and The Hustlers. Both sides find value in the experience, but only one truly thrives.

Meet the Academics

The Academics view Y Combinator as “startup school.” They show up, sit down, and follow the program. Their motto is, “If I just do what I’m told, I’ll ‘graduate’ successfully.”
If there’s a dinner Tuesday at 6:00 p.m., they show up Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. If there’s a speaker Friday at 3:00 p.m., they show up Friday at 3:00 p.m. They take notes, do their homework, and follow the schedule.
And this approach works. Y Combinator’s designed to help startups, so you’ll learn a lot even if all you do is follow the program. But just “following the program” is like graduating with a “C.” Sure, you passed, but you left the majority of your education on the table.

Meet the Hustlers

The Hustlers, on the other hand, don’t leave any source of potential value untapped. They recognize YC as the resource-rich environment it is and take full responsibility for their experience. Their motto is, “We’re here to make our business successful, and we’re going to leverage every possible resource to make that happen.”
Hustlers take, learn, leverage, and ask for as much as they can. If the doors of the YC offices are open, they’re there. They know the best opportunities and most valuable introductions are rarely a part of the official “program.” After all, that program is meant to be the launching pad, not the finish line.

Channeling your Inner Hustler

The biggest mistake I see YC attendees make is playing it safe. If you leave the program wishing you had spent more time with someone or gotten more help with something, that’s your fault, and no one else’s.
The YC leadership is there to help. They want you to succeed. They want you to ask questions. They want you to be proactive. But it isn’t their responsibility to make you do any of those things.
As a result, many YC attendees don’t ask questions. They aren’t proactive. And they don’t reach their full potential. But that’s good news for those that do.
Let me share three short stories to illustrate the importance of taking ownership of your YC experience; hopefully, they’ll help you make the best of yours.

“As it turns out, something opened up.”

As a relatively unknown founder, there’s practically nothing you can do to force a VC to care about your sense of urgency. I learned this lesson the hard way.
My team and I were trying to close a round of fundraising in the next two weeks, but the VC partners we needed to meet with weren’t available for at least another month.
That timeline didn’t work for us, so we sat down with Paul Graham and asked if he’d be willing to reach out to the firm on our behalf to tell them how amazing we are and urge them to prioritize our meeting.
When pg agreed, I was prepared. I pulled out my laptop, which already had a web browser open, and said, “Great! Can you do this right now?”
He did. Less than 12 hours later, we had a response from the firm, informing us they “suddenly” had an opening on their calendar in just two days.

“You’ve got better things to do, just sign it.”

Another time, I needed pg to sign a recommendation letter so I could get my visa. I’d already drafted the letter and all I needed from him was the signature. He agreed but, being the talented writer he is, wanted to re-write my draft to make it really good.
I needed that signature now, and I didn’t know how long it would take for pg (who is an incredibly busy guy) to get around to those revisions. So instead of waiting and hoping, I followed up. An hour later, I showed up at the Y Combinator office with letter and pen in hand. “Just sign it,” I said. “Just sign it. I know you’ve got better things to do.”
He did, revisions be damned, and I’m still here; so I must’ve done something right.

“These guys make shit happen.”

And yet another time, we were trying to recruit the unrecruitable by hiring Phil Freo. He wasn’t convinced, so we invited him to a YC dinner to have pg help us convince him.
He sat Phil down and said something like, “Look, these guys are weird, but they’re really effective. In fact, they’re one of the best startups in the batch, simply because they make shit happen. They’re aggressive. They’re shameless. They’re humble and open-minded, sure, but they’re intense. They don’t wait for things to happen. They make things happen.”
And to be honest? It didn’t work, at least, not at first. Although his initial answer was no, Phil ended up joining the team a few years later. I like to think pg's endorsement played a big part in that. (Thanks again, pg!)

You are your own biggest obstacle

I could share a thousand stories but, at the end of the day, it’s as simple as this: In Y Combinator (as in life), you’re going to get what you take. YC is a resource-rich environment filled with people who can and will help you; but no one there owes you anything, nor do they know what you need unless you tell them.

• Need feedback on product design? Ask.
• Want to get connected to investors or the press? Ask.
• Need help recruiting? Ask.

In YC, everything you need to succeed is right in front of you (or only an introduction away). The founders who get the most value out of this program are those who know this and leverage that knowledge constantly, sometimes even shamelessly.
So ask for an unreasonable amount of office hours. Ask for off-the-wall favors. Ask for more than you expect to get.
Because remember, you’re in an environment where people want you to succeed. You aren’t doing them (or yourself) any favors by being timid. So step up, be bold, be loud, and be proactive. Know what you want, and do whatever it takes to make that happen.
Do this consistently and I promise: You’ll crush it inside and out of Y Combinator.

Grow your startup with a free copy of From 0 to 1000 Customers & Beyond.

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