Intro to the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference
I’m very excited to be advising a conference that my good friend Noah Kagan is putting together, sponsored by my current employer, the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures. So here’s a lengthy plug for the conference.
But first, let me cut to the chase:
10% discount on registration for the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference
Here’s the schedule, which includes folks like:
- Jason Feffer, Former VP Operations for MySpace, and CEO, Sodahead: 0 to 90+ million users
- Jia Shen, CTO and co-founder of RockYou: 0 to 150+ million widgets
- Joe Greenstein, CEO and co-founder of Flixster, 0 to 20+ million users
- Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO and co-founder of Hi5, 0 to 50+ million users
- Jonathan Abrams, CEO of Socializr and ex-founder of Friendster
- Timothy Ferriss, NY Times Bestselling author of "4-hour Workweek"
- Eric Nakagawa, creator of the blog juggernaut, icanhascheezburger.com
- … and many others
What an amazing, amazing lineup.
Every web 2.0 entrepreneur needs viral marketing to succeed
Quite simply, EVERY internet entrepreneur should come to this conference. If your model is based on advertising, to make a real business you need massive scale in terms of traffic and users.
Real scale means 10s of milions of users, which you simply can’t buy. To use Google AdSense to buy as many users as you need, you’d be spending 10s of millions to acquire them, which is too much. Paid advertising simply doesn’t work there, which means you need huge, daily, organic growth.
Learn how to engineer viral growth
Viral marketing can be engineered. People are building custom analytics against repeatable viral processes (and "viral loops," as they call them) in order to drive that organic traffic. If you think that acquiring users is about making a great product, or just about making widgets, you’re missing out on the systematic techniques that the companies at this conference have used to drive tremendous traffic.
Distribution often beats quality product
In fact, in many cases the product is less important than how you get it out there. Take something like MS Paint or Notepad. These tools are ubiquitous, and millions of people use them even though there are FREE, better products out there, simply because they are the standard. In fact, that’s really what being "the standard" means – you have such great product distribution that you don’t need to worry anymore.
See you guys there!