Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (Lean (O'Reilly))

by Alistair Croll

A Summary of the Virality Stage Virality refers to the spread of a message from existing, “infected” users to new users. If every user successfully invites more than one other user, your growth is almost assured. While this is seldom the case, any word of mouth adds to customer growth and reduces your overall customer acquisition costs. Inherent virality happens naturally as users interact with your product. Artificial virality is incentivized and less genuine. And word of mouth, while hard to create and track, drives a lot of early adoption. You need to segment users who come from all three kinds of virality. In addition to viral coefficient, you care about viral cycle time. The sooner each user invites another one, the faster you’ll grow. As you grow in the Virality and Revenue stages, you’re trying to find leading indicators of future growth: metrics that can be measured early in a user’s lifecycle that predict — or, better yet, control — what the future will be.