Andrew Chen has a great post analyzing the viral loop of Yahoo! Mash. This is a good example of how to think about the viral loop of an application. He says that Yahoo! Mash’s viral loop is:
- Getting an invite that a friend set up a profile for him.
- Going through the addressbook importer screen
- Agreeing to accept/reject Randy’s changes
- Setting up my profile, etc.
- Putting a friend’s e-mail into the invite form
- Then my friend gets an e-mail (with notice that I set it up for him)
So, it’s a 6 step viral loop. I agree with Andrew’s point that not being able to automatically invite from your address book is definitely going to hurt the viral loop. It looks like they are going for quality over quantity, but there is a lot of evidence that quantity can lead to massive growth.
When thinking about growing a site, the viral loop is a key component to consider. I’ll have to see how this applies to Mixbook…
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