So you’ve achieved product market fit and the question is
now how do you gain traction and grow. Well one way to do this before you even
launch is to design your product for growth.
Designing your product for growth can be done in a vast
array of methodologies. A simple example would be Hot Mail, one of the original
viral growth companies of the technology era in which we currently reside. They
were able to achieve fast and massive growth after launch simply by including a
small promotion for their product at the end of every email sent using hotmail.
As people received emails from their friends using hotmail they were then
recruited because of the promo and the fact that someone they trusted (whoever
sent the email) was using the product.
One of my favorite approaches to designing a product for
growth though is through game mechanics.
While you might not know what game mechanics are you are subjected to
them on a daily basis. At it’s simplest game mechanics are defined as a “rule based systems / simulations that
facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their
possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.” Cool,
you still probably have no idea what I am talking about.
A good example of game mechanics in action would be
foursquare. When they let become a “mayor” of a spot by checking in there all
the time it encourages you to use the product more because there is now an
added dimension to it. Another, non-app, example would be Coca-Cola. Every time
you crack open a bottle of Coke there is a little code on the bottom of the
top. These codes give you rewards if you enter them into the Coke website. This
is again an example of game mechanics being used to encourage your further
exploration into the product you are currently consuming. We also some of the
game mechanics in action at create lab. Some of their products were made to be
entertaining for kids but at a deeper level encourage technological literacy in
children. By doing things such as making see through housing they facilitated
the exploration of technology through a more enjoyable mediums.
I would be curious to see how social ventures can greater
leverage the use of game mechanics and other viral growth strategies to further
push the ideal of contentious capitalism into the mainstream.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-free-email-at-hotmail/
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