DISQUS

Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen): 5 crucial stages in designing your viral loop

  • David Binetti · 3 months ago
    The pivot in stage four is the one that will be the toughest. Setting out the Customer Development hypotheses in advance might help gauge when it's time to do a full iteration.

    Great post -- and super-funny picture!
  • Andrew Chen · 3 months ago
    I think doing a pivot - when, how - is one of the hardest choices to make in here. This discussion probably deserves a full blog post, but I find there's often a point in optimizing products where you're stuck and can't find anything beyond small improvements - then it's often time to try a new market position or value proposition rather than shifting pages and buttons around.
  • zantay · 3 months ago
    Andrew, I'm going to need some time to digest this, good stuff
  • John Vars · 3 months ago
    Great post Andrew. Very helpful.

    In your experience what sort of traffic do you need in absolute numbers at step 3 to really validate whether this is working or not? $50/day can mean very little or a lot of traffic depending on your product/vertical. Would you recommend tens, hundreds or thousands of users to enter the funnel for a valid analysis?

    Thanks,
    John
    Dogster
  • Andrew Chen · 3 months ago
    I think you need hundreds to enter the funnel or more, but it depends on the level of differences between a test candidate and its alternatives (I'll leave the math to someone else, but you can read about this discussion in "landing page optimization" books/posts). So usually that means dozens of users per day so that experiments close in a few days.

    One advantage of early optimizations is that the differences are often quite high, and thus you can use smaller datasets to show differences. When the differences are smaller, and/or the response rates are lower, then you need more data run over more days.
  • Joseph T. Dager · 2 months ago
    One of the best summaries that I have seen on the subject of going viral. Sounds very similar to the lean processes of PDCA - Plan Do Check Act. However, very well put in industry terms. I like it!