Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
132
 www.ideavirus.com
Was it risky? I don’t think so. A boring, hard to spell, meaningless name like Lycos was risky.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
133
 www.ideavirus.com
Being The Most
Turns out there’s been a battle going on for a few years—the battle to make the hottest hot
sauce in the world.
At the beginning, you made a hot sauce by using peppers. Hotter peppers made hotter sauce.
And a sauce made from Scotch Bonnet Peppers (the hottest peppers on Earth) was the
hottest sauce on Earth.
Then, some nutty scientist figured out how to extract just the essence of hotness from Scotch
Bonnet Pepper puree. By using gas chromotagraphy or some other evil technology, he was
able to create a sauce more than 1,000,000 times spicier than your basic pepper.
Why does this matter? Because being the hottest hot sauce ever made is like being the Mona
Lisa. Because if I’ve managed to eat chili with the hottest hot sauce ever made in it, I’m
going to tell my friends. I’m going to spread your hot-sauce virus. If it’s the second or third
hottest, who cares?
There’s always room in any list for the world record holder. The greatest basketball player
who ever lived, or the nastiest restaurant owner, or the fastest computer. It’s noteworthy. It’s
news. It’s worth sharing.
My dad’s hospital crib company dominates the market, making most of the cribs that are
used in hospitals around the world. Their standard models cost $700 to $2,000 each, and
they last forever. How to grow the business? How to get more attention and more sales?
His engineers found a leading hospital, and together they designed the best (and the most
expensive) hospital crib in the world. With all the options, it costs about $7,000. Yet it’s
selling like crazy, from the Philippines to Tuscon. Why? Because it’s worth talking about.
Because it embodies an idea, and it’s an idea worth sharing.
Google.com has plenty of traffic, yet they’ve never spent a nickel on advertising. How?
Because it’s the fastest and most complete search engine ever built. Electronically amplified

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