Learning Viral: Add-on or Natural

Last week I had a great meeting with the casual-games / viral guru and VC extraordinaire Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures. If you can get money from him please take it. Anyways, we were talking about the casual games experience and virality when he mentioned something about the ways of incorporating virality.

Add-on: This is the generic “idea” of virality that many people use.

Natural: This is where the process of inviting, growing and spreading your site is the fun/natural way of growing it. As well, the virality coefficient or growth should be much greater than an add-on site. What are some examples of this?

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- Friends for Sale on Facebook. You want to buy and sell your friends and play that game. And in the process you are inviting more and more people through that experience.
- Paypal. I sent you $45 via email. Heck yes, you are going to create an account and accept that money.
- Virtual teams like Manager Zone. You are not inviting your friends, you are recruiting your team members to play on your team.

Bottom Line: It’s like adding a Ferrari engine to a Honda. It’s still a Honda. Try to think of ways that people want to compare with another, choose their friends not invite and it’s a natural part of the part process.

What are other examples of natural virality?