Wise Startup Blog

Getting to that critical tipping point where your user base grows day after day is what web entrepreneurs hope for with each new product release or marketing push, but going viral is a work in progress. Becoming one of the best websites, with the most traffic doesn’t come easy.

Don’t expect to hit virality with that one big release, it takes time, and if you follow these steps, you can mimick the success we’re now seeing with Grooveshark.

1. Be Everywhere On The Web

Greg Rollet was kind enough to mention us when talking about owning Twitter. If someone utters your name on Twitter, be there to thank them for their support, help them with their question or to learn from their gripes:

When you see these notes come out, whether they be on Twitter or on a blog, the best move is always to say something. Even if the guy is telling you how much he hates your service, you should acknowledge their objection and still thank them for their time. If you listen to someone, no matter how vile they may be, you could end up turning them into one of your biggest advocates. Never miss an opportunity to interact with your users, they’ll remember it and it’ll pay dividends for you later on.

To help you out with monitoring the web, here are a couple of services:

Google Alerts
Sends you an email whenever anyone mentions your name on the web. Sometimes emails are delayed, so if you have a big release coming out, you can ping Google Blog Search every 5 minutes. With enough creativity, Google Alerts can be modified to follow competitors as well as your own properties. I have about 15 different alerts setup and it makes it real easy to have a quick response time to any comments or posts.

TweetScan
Sends you a daily roundup email on every instance of your keyword mentioned on Twitter for that day. Tweetscan is really helpful for doing a bulk @-reply to all your fans, friends, and whiners

2. Be Prepared for Launch Day

When the fate of your entire company can rest on 1 or 2 days, it’s pretty important that your team takes the necessary steps to prepare for launch day. When planning to launch a new product or your simply launch your product for the first time, you must be prepared or it’s all over.

How many times have you seen a startup get on the frontpage of Digg only to be taken down minutes or hours later. Well what if you have this great plan in place, and despite your best efforts, your server meltdown because you couldn’t afford to buy enough resources prior to the launch. Well, what does your 404 Error Page or 500 Error Page look like?

It better be pretty, and explanatory of the situation that’s going on: “We’re sorry, we had such a great response from our fans that our servers took a nose-dive. We’re working as hard as possible to restore service and we wanted to thank you all for your support. Best, XYZ.”

The planning extends from securing every level of coverage, to hardware uptime, to the inevitable downtime or hiccups.

Startups aren’t perfect, don’t think that even because you have $20 million in the bank things are going to be any different. Look at Apple, their market cap is whatever $200 Billion, and their MobileMe launch was horrific.

In the short lifespan of a startup, you only have a few opportunities to show your face to the world. If you fumble your words and end up looking like a moron, your startup career is going to be very shortlived (although you may have a YouTube career on your hands).

Put an action plan in place, stick to it, and plan for the unexpected. You only get 1 or 2 chances to do this right. Being best means being precise executing at maximum efficiency.

3. Get the Interface Right

Speaking from personal experience, if you don’t have a product that wows people from a visual level, you don’t have a very good chance of going viral. Sure, Craigslist isn’t the sexiest site in the world and you can’t say much for Wikipedia, but there are only a handful, and a very select handful at that, of websites that are able to go viral on content alone.

Don’t get me wrong, you need the content, but if your website is sexy as hell, people will make exceptions. It’s a scientific fact that, as a whole, people make exceptions for good looking people and make assumptions about them succeeding, despite knowing nothing about them. The same probably applies to websites, so make sure you’re among the fashion elite.

When designing your website, make sure you have the help of a skilled graphic designer being involved in the process. Have them go through, clean things up, gloss them up, and make sure the site looks really polished. The difference between a clean, well designed site and a, “developer-designed,” site is night and day.

Plus, the truly key element in going viral is making a good first impression. Your goal as a startup entrepreneur is to break into the mainstream audience, and the one thing mainstream people care about is looking good. They can’t tell you a PHP from a P2P, but they can say if something looks good or not.

Using sites like Stumbleupon for advertising is where having a great visual interface really pays off. Stumbleupon costs $.05 per user, and used correctly, can net you tens of thousands of uniques each month for pennies on the dollar. Stumbleupon users will make a decision good or bad on your page based solely on the looks.

If it looks good, they thumbs up, if it looks bad, they thumbs down. Simple as that. Make sure to invest in a really really good graphic designer, otherwise, plan on building out your content to the maximum extent, spending wayyy too much money on advertising, and plan for some tough growing pains.

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When looking at our growth, and the reasons people have heard about our site, it’s a combination of a couple of references:

1. Word of mouth
2. Read about you on XYZ website
3. Stumbleupon

And honestly speaking, I think Stumbleupon leads us to the first and second references. People are blown away by the design, they check out the site, they write a blog, and they tell a friend. Rinse, repeat.

If you want to create a community that is best in class, and inspires others to put together “the best of website” lists, you need to be humble, always learning, and cognizant of every detail.

Any tips to share on how your site went viral?