Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
167
 www.ideavirus.com
So, there has to be a middle ground. And the middle ground that makes the most sense to
me is to not launch a business that can’t sustain an ideavirus. And second, not to force an
ideavirus to happen before the market is ready for it.
My best example is Amazon. My firm belief is that if Jeff Bezos had launched it a year later
or a year earlier, it would never have worked. A year too early and there wouldn’t have been
enough sneezers and the medium wouldn’t have been ready to spread the word. A year too
late and the market would have been so overheated that his promise would have never
broken through the clutter and attracted the attention of sneezers in the first place.
It’s hard for me to imagine how a $50 million marketing campaign is ever appropriate for
any business to launch an ideavirus. If you need to interrupt that many people, you’re doing
something wrong. Sure, you need that much (actually, much more than that) to launch a
brand and to do traditional marketing. But if you’re virusworthy, you generally can do it for
a lot less money than that.
So you need to match the speed of your virus not just with the money you raise but also with
the promises you make to your investors. Yes, Hotmail and Netscape and ICQ and eBay
grew fast, fast, fast. But that doesn’t mean you will. Optimize for the virus and build it into
your company—or expect that it isn’t going to happen.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
168
 www.ideavirus.com
The Heart Of Viral Marketing
Remember, viral marketing is a special case of the ideavirus where the amplifier for the virus
is built right into the product. And the hot spot for this wonderful self-propagating process is
in communication products.
Let’s take a look at the history of interpersonal business communication over the last 120
years:
Stamps
Telegraph
Telegram
Telephone
Telex
Fax
Conference Calls
Federal Express
Cell Phones
Videoconferencing
Email
The Web
ICQ and Instant Messaging
It’s a pretty extraordinary list. Twenty-five years ago, when I got my first real job, we had no
voice mail, no web pages, no fax machine, no cell phones, no pagers and no email. I
sometimes wonder what we did all day!
So why is there such rapid innovation in this field, when, at the same time, we are still using
precisely the same Qwerty keyboard found on the early typewriters and the same pink “while
you were out” message pads that came with the first phone?

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