Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
155
 www.ideavirus.com
But that’s okay. It’s okay because these idea merchants understand that the hive they’re
targeting is 
not
everyone. They understand that if they choose the right hive, it’s okay if it’s
small, it’s okay if it’s not everyone. The caveat, of course, is to match your expenses and your
expectations to the size of the hive you’ve chosen. If you spend big on product development
and marketing, figuring that will get you over the chasm, it better.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
156
 www.ideavirus.com
The Myth Of The Tipping Point
One of the most seductive ideas in Gladwell’s 
The Tipping Point
is that somehow a magic
moment appears when the entire population goes from blissful unawareness of your offering
to total and complete infatuation.
While this certainly appears to happen, it’s not a reality for most companies and most ideas,
and it’s not even a requisite for mindblowing success. There are two related reasons for this.
The first is that it ignores the power of the hive. The chances that you’re going to launch an
ideavirus that consumes the entire population is slim indeed. After all, there are seven billion
people out there, and all of them have very different needs and communication cycles. Even
if you just boil it down to the United States, or to Republicans with Internet access, it’s
pretty clear that large hives very rarely tip about anything.
The second reason is that winning and tipping aren’t the same thing. In order to really win
with an ideavirus, you have to concentrate your message very tightly on a specific hive. But
even then it’s not clear to me that you have to tip to win.
Let’s take a look at eBay, for example. By almost any measure, eBay is a winner. It’s
employees are millionaires and billionaires. Early investors are delighted. Users are happy,
with time spent on the service going up all the time.
But has eBay tipped? Certainly not in terms of awareness among the general population.
When asked to name an online service, only a tiny fraction of the population picks eBay as
their first choice. But it gets even more obvious when you ask people where they go to buy
and sell used junk. The vast majority of people are using classified ads and garage sales, 
not
eBay.
Yes, the management of eBay is on the cover of 
Fortune
and 
Business Week
at least once a
month, or so it seems. Yes, every meeting at certain high-tech companies includes the
sentence, “But will this allow us to become the eBay of [insert business here].” Within a very
small, very focused, very profitable hive, eBay 
is
a winner. But it didn’t happen because some

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