Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
118
 www.ideavirus.com
Will eFax be guaranteed an easy upgrade path to paying customers? I have no idea. Some
businesses (like email) will be stuck at FREE forever, thus making the whole journey hard to
justify. In this case, they could offer free faxes with an eight-hour delay before you get them,
but for $5 a month, you get the faxes instantly. So it’s free for me to try out, free to spread,
but profitable after lock-in is achieved.
The challenge, of course, is to figure out which businesses have a payoff at the end. The
challenge is also to be patient enough to wait, to introduce the friction of charging at just the
right moment.
Watts Wacker catapulted his career by writing 
The 500 Year Delta
. After the book came out,
people started to hand it around, to embrace his ideas. This led to larger audiences and a
dramatic increase in bookings for speaking engagements. In a few months, I’m confident he
made more in speaking fees than he had from royalties on the book. By letting the ideavirus
grow before trying to extract much profit, he was able to make more money in the end.
In very transparent markets like the Internet, the fear is that all ideaviruses will be so
competitive that you’ll never be able to extract money. That’s why the race to fill the vacuum
is so intense. If you can fill the vacuum aggressively and permanently, it is far easier to extract
money.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
119
 www.ideavirus.com
Think Like A Music Executive (Sometimes)
There are plenty of lessons you can learn about viruses from folks in the music industry
(current behavior notwithstanding, but more on that later).
First, industry executives realize that nobody buys a CD because they like the quality of the
polycarbonate disc. If you don’t like the idea of the music, you’re not going to buy it.
Second, they realize that making money later is way more important than making money
now. They learned this the hard way. Consider radio for a second. Before radio, music sales
were tiny. Why would you buy a song for your Victrola if you’d never heard it before? How
could you know if it was any good?
At first, radio might seem like a threat to the recorded music industry. After all, they play the
ENTIRE song, not just a few notes. And if it’s a hit song, you can hear it night and day on
the radio every few minutes if you’re so inclined.
For a while, the music business fought the idea of radio stations playing songs for little or no
compensation. Then, in the 1950s, they realized how valuable airplay was—so valuable that
a congressional inquiry discovered that music labels were bribing disk jockeys to play their
records.
Fast forward a few decades to MTV. Once again, the music labels balked at supporting
MTV’s insistence that they provide expensively produced music videos—for free! It took a
year or two for them to discover that MTV 
made
hits—that giving away the music for free
turned out to be the best way to sell the music.
Music execs know that you’ll pay nothing to hear a song on the radio, but if you like it,
you’ll gladly pay $15 for the CD. And that if you love the CD, you’re more likely to pay $40
for tickets to the local concert, where you might be converted to a raving sneezer, much more
likely to infect your friends and neighbors with raves about the band, the song, even the
souvenirs!

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