👋 Hi, I’m Kyle from OpenView and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on SaaS pricing, product-led growth, public company benchmarks, and much more.

When we think about inherently viral products, what comes to mind are collaboration products like video conferencing (Zoom), meeting scheduling (Calendly), messaging (Slack), async video (Loom) and so on. Many of these products are only valuable when they’re used in multi-player mode, giving users a powerful incentive to share the products with others.

Life is good for viral products since these products not only sell themselves, they market themselves too. OpenView’s Product Benchmarks report showed that the fastest-growing companies generate 2x as many new sign-ups from product referrals compared to everyone else. Who doesn’t love fast user growth with a $0 CAC?

Even if your product isn’t inherently viral like Loom or Calendly, it pays to give product virality a second look. Consider that it’s far easier to generate growth from your existing product users than it is to acquire totally new ones. This truism includes increasing the engagement and advocacy of existing customers as well. And virality can occur even in unexpected places. After all, who would’ve expected a single-player product like Wordle to become a viral phenomenon?

I investigated how to position nearly any PLG product for virality along with real-life examples from Calendly, Loom, Notion, Typeform and more. Below are some insights from that investigation.

Special thanks to Oji Udezue (Product Lead, Twitter; Former Chief Product Officer, Calendly; follow on Web - Twtr - Medium) and Nick Lafferty (Head of Growth Marketing, Loom; follow on Web - Twtr) for sharing their wisdom and advice.

Oji is a product leader with experience at innovative companies like Calendly, Twitter, and Atlassian. When Oji talks about virality, he defines it fairly broadly and inclusively as customer-assisted marketing. In other words, anything your product itself does that enables your existing customers to create a tailwind that attracts net new customers. This applies to many viral strategies in products with raving fans whether it’s Slack, Superhuman, or Away.

For Nick, virality happens when the act of using your product introduces other new users. At Loom, virality doesn’t occur when a user records a Loom video - it happens when that user shares the video and someone else watches it.

Just because a product is a communication tool doesn’t mean it’ll inherently become viral (and vice versa). As proof, Oji pointed to the example of Atlassian’s communication products like HipChat and Stride, which the company discontinued and sold the IP to Slack. Meanwhile there are many products that don’t have a built-in communication layer, yet still manage to go viral.

Step one to product virality: obsess over early user feedback and the extent to which users organically promote your product to others. People naturally promote products they love and brands they’re connected to.

The simplest way to measure virality is based on the K-factor: how many additional users does one existing user bring to the product? That gets broken down a step further into (a) how many invitations do users send out (social exposures)? and (b) what percentage of those invites are accepted?

Easy to say, hard to pin down in practice. B2B product virality isn’t as simple as saying “user X invited five folks and 25% of them accepted so my K-factor is 1.25.” One key difficulty is that a lot of social exposures can still happen in real life, e.g. “I love this product!”, and that’s hard to track through analytics. Although that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!

Consider Typeform, for example. Users create a new Typeform and share that Typeform with their audience, generating invaluable exposure for the product. The typical respondent probably doesn’t need to create their own survey at that precise moment in time and so direct conversion is likely anemic. But those invited users may remember Typeform later on during their moment of need, and either seek out Typeform via Google or go directly to Typeform’s website.

Loom measures virality using a strict last-touch attribution model, looking at whether the last touch a new user had was from the marketing website, watching a Loom, a paid ad, or something else. While a last-touch model likely underestimates the true impact of Loom’s viral loop, it helps Loom understand the ROI of any of their marketing efforts above and beyond the organic viral loop.

Measuring virality is baked into just about everything Loom does. When Loom runs product experiments or marketing experiments, they’re carefully watching whether the experiment has an impact on Loom’s viral multiplier effect. The company even has a weekly virality operating meeting for cross-functional teams to stay aligned on that metric.

Oji recommends fingerprinting or cookie-ing any invited visitor who’s interacted with your product. Whether the user comes back immediately or a month later, you can find out if they encountered your product before they actually signed up and develop relatively high confidence that the product exposure was the reason why they came back.

A fallback metric if you’re just getting started: direct traffic via Google Analytics.