Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
1. The ideavirus space for “online merchant” is already filled. It’s filled by Amazon, and to a
lesser, more twisted degree, by eBay and Priceline.
2. Given that the big space is filled, they ought to understand that the virus they’re going to
spread is going to be far smaller and far more quirky. Thus, the win is smaller, but the good
news is that they’ll need far less money to get there.
3. Once you accept the second point, you can realize that growing a virus slowly is actually a
better strategy. Why? Because you get to perfect your business model as you grow, and you
get holistic, organic virus growth, instead of the forced growth a Super Bowl ad brings you.
In other words, you actually get to earn the people who visit your site.
Diamond Organics (www.diamondorganics.com) is following this approach, and it’s
working. Instead of trying to be a category killer and spending tons of money to persuade the
world that their organic vegetable-by-Federal-Express business is a good one, they’re instead
focused on delighting one customer at a time.
By spending little and scaling a lot more slowly, Diamond is able to build serious sneezers,
sneezers who are quite powerful and need little additional inducement to spread the word.
By getting their systems into shape they avoid the pitfalls that struck ToysRUs.com last
Christmas.
But doesn’t this fly in the face of the ideavirus mantra? In many ways it does. It also
challenges the permission marketing idea that once a consumer solves a problem, they’re not
in any hurry to find someone else to solve the same problem, so vendors can achieve lock-
out.
The problem with implementing the grow-slow strategy is that you might not get the
chance. If you’re a CEO or marketing executive in a new business, you’re subject to the
Catch-22 of rapid business development. You can’t grow (and you can’t get funded) if you
don’t make promises, but those promises might not be able to be kept. And if the promises
aren’t kept (ToysRUs.com failing to ship in time for Christmas) or the promises cost too
much to keep (Boo.com) it doesn’t matter anyway, because you’ll be bust. So most
entrepreneurs make the promises anyway, even though they realize that organic growth is the
better strategy.

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