Recently I took some time to reflect on my experiences with various teams over my career. Long time ago I believed that in order to get great things out of a team, you’d just need to hire the most qualified people and they would figure things out on their own. Later on I learned that even a group of talented people could make a mess without shared rules and procedures.

Over the last couple of years, teams in any organization have experienced unprecedented uncertainty and chaos. If a team tries to stay the course or even scale in turbulent times, more than ever, processes become the lighthouse in the uncharted waters. It brings clarity, simplicity, and quality. Put it in a function for a product team:

Product= Process (People)

In reality People as the input of a team is not controllable all the time. But Process can be established and optimized regardless. To some degree, it can offset the lack of experience and poor judgement in People.

Processes are the standardized procedures a product team and its members follow to work internally and collaborate externally. Not only do we need a process for every stage of product management such as ideate, prioritize, design, develop, release, assess and track, but also a process to interface with stakeholders in other functions and, more importantly, one to work with end users and eliminate frictions in operationalization in order to drive adoption.

Processes can make or break a team. When they are poorly designed or often times don’t even exist, you will end up with:

❌ Quick outputs, but poor outcomes without testing and validation
❌ Poor product design without looping in users
❌ User pushbacks due to failure in addressing key pain points in PRD
❌ Unrealistic expectations from stakeholders due to lack of alignment
❌ Loss of independency and critical thinking
❌ Buggy releases without QA and acceptance criteria
❌ Low feature adoption without helping users operationalize and eliminate frictions
(Just to name a few)

Like a product, processes can be optimized and iterated. People who manage the process become Product Ops. They are NOT project managers, but Product Managers of processes. In his article about ProductOps (link in comment), John Cutler writes, “it requires product management and strategy. It also involves a lot of systems thinking, service design, operation’s chops, learning design, and experience shepherding change experiments.”

My recommendation is to apply your PM mindset to process design. Start with a different MVP, Minimum Viable Process, and iterate from there. However you design it, never foget the key component of the process is continuous alignment with your users, cross-functional team stakeholders, business goals and company’s vision.

To be continued

I religiously believe a product with true value to its customers can gain tremendous growth through viral loops without spending a penny on advertising.

In the consumer product sector, what most companies are commonly doing to create a motion for Word of Mouth (WOM) is:

• Incentivize existing customers to refer friends. In return, they get credit while their friends get a discount.
• Request an existing customer to submit a review, which will be published on the company’s website or social media.
• Or like many lifestyle brands, solicit customers for posts with designed hashtags via personal handles on social media to share their experience with the product/service.

These traditional ways of generating WOM may work with a happy customer for once, but not always.

First, this old-school model creates friction in the process and is hard to scale. When a customer is happy, all of those actions could be happening without even asking. New customers arguably would do it, but return customers are busy or reluctant to keep fulfilling those requests unless hugely rewarded.

Second, big companies end up doubling down on referrals. However, heavily incentivizing referrals not only hurt business but also lures one-off customers who come for the sake of the heavy discounts, which is bad for business in the long run.

Third, in the case where both the referrer and referee are driven by the luring incentives, little value is generated. Yet it creates an illusion over time for marketers to think referral is the most effective channel to acquire customers.

After working at a consumer marketplace company in hospitality for 15 months where we are doing the same old tricks with referrals, I feel stronger than ever that the key to unlocking value-added virality is to productize the model and automate the process.

I was glancing at one of my Miro boards the other day and noticed a growth engine map I did for a marketplace B2C company a few years back. On a note I wrote:

It’s TOO MUCH to ask a happy customer for a review, a referral and a post on social media.

We need a feature to let them DO LESS, but get the 3 tasks done all at once.

Easy, incentivized, personal and professional.

The golden rule for building a tech company is to build it like a media company. It resonates within the context of virality. Product growth needs WOM. Instagram-worthy personalized content will motivate customers to share with the world. How to help customers easily create business-driving content to be published across social media is what we need to figure out.

To be continued

A few months in, the pandemic has taken a toll on everyone financially and mentally. With unemployment rates hitting new highs and people isolated from their normal social life, finding ways to be self-sufficient is crucial and connecting with your local community has never been more important. So we decided to address those burning needs by focusing Harbor on driving community-based commerce.

Our mission is to enable people to start and grow their businesses in safe, inclusive and bonded local communities. We are building a platform powered and protected by technology that allows people to buy, sell and trade with confidence and ease of mind. It’s our top priority to offer a fast, safe and reliable service to ensure your needs are met anytime, anywhere.

The pandemic is catalyzing the digital transformation of the world. It’s time to innovate and reactivate the local economy. Join us to build a safe Harbor for all. Are you ready?

From Ning to Substack

TL;DR

Virality is the cheapest, yet the best performing channel to acquire new users. For any startup, virality is key to a successful pre- and post-launch when constrained resources don’t give you the bandwidth for paid acquisition.

When a product is going viral it usually can mean quite different things such as relevant content spreading quickly on social media, or Word-of-Mouth (WOM), or buzz in the market, or an influx of signups through referral. But there’s a clear line between virality as a means to market a product and as the functionality of a product. To create a product with virality in its DNA, you need to meet these requirements:

• Does this product enable users to create User Generated Content (UGC)?
• Does this product provide users with the tools to build a community around the UGC?
• Does this product grant autonomy to the users so they can monetize the community on their own terms?

Why?

Because when a user becomes a creator who builds a new community on your platform, it automatically adds another viral engine to your growth. Those users will proactively grow their communities that will disseminate your product at scale. So, theoretically, you don’t have to do anything to promote your product.

The multiple viral loops — creator to user/creator to creator/user to user — accelerate the compounding growth and amplify the network effect.

Spread Like A Virus

Every once in a while a new product would emerge and take the world by storm. Its user base snowballed at a speed like a virus spreading among people. That’s where, in product terms, VIRALITY stems from.

Any product regardless of B2B or B2C can create viral loops to drive user growth. The strategy may not always work, but when it does, magic happens. There are so many classic cases such as the link appended to every email that was sent out through Hotmail or Facebook’s rapid expansion from within .edu to including everyone in the world or YouTube gaining popularity by allowing people to embed videos on their MySpace profile pages or Intercom…… The list goes on and on.

However, there is a type of product that truly possesses the full power of virality from the inside out. Like a virus, those products can quickly identify some hosts (early adopters) in an ideal environment (PMF) and then immediately start self-replicating (user-generated hordes). A chain reaction is set off the moment those hosts have become sources of contagion (the first cohort that sets viral loops in motion).

Viral Is Ning’s DNA

More than a decade ago, shortly after MySpace and Facebook had sparked the social network fad, a new company called NING showed up. Founded by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, Ning.com was built to feed people’s desire to own a social network. Ning’s users could CREATE their social networks, EXPAND them through viral loops, and MONETIZE them. The last piece of the recipe is critical, simply because when a creator cannot support him/herself by running the network, s/he will eventually lose the drive and funding to grow it. That’s the big difference between a hobby and a business.

Ning.com charges users by the number of members of their social networks. Users may monetize the network any way they see fit: paid access to content; paid membership; donation.

According to the Fast Company’s article, Ning’s user base was doubling every day. Today, Ning has supported 2M+ social networks.

What NING has built is still a network consisting of nodes, but each node represents an ecosystem by itself. The multiple viral loops — creator to user/creator to creator/user to user — accelerate the compounding growth and amplify the network effect.

Substack Grants Writers Autonomy

Substack appears to be an email newsletter service for writers who can publish their works and charge the subscribers on their own terms. Quite simple, isn’t it? But, as Andrew Chen, who sits on their board, writes in an a16z announcement,

Substack can solve the structural issues between publishers/writers and readers in a way that aligns the incentives between all of them. This is the moment the next generation of media is being built.

Substack is leveling up the publishing game. In contrast with Medium, Substack grants AUTONOMY to writers: unconditional ownership of readers and monetization. Many writers are already migrating from Medium to Substack because the latter provides more value — credit and money — to writers.

Substack is a decentralized publishing network. Currently, most of the writers operate their newsletters independently. The full power of Substack is when writers bundle up and establish writer groups in their niche. Medium is a digital publishing house, but Substack is creating an infinite number of micro-publishing houses.

In his article on Substack’s growth loops and monetization model, Brian Balfour defines Substack’s fast growth as primarily driven by the “User Generated, User Distributed content loop.”

Substack's Core Growth Loop - Brian Balfour

Similar to Ning, the multiple viral loops of Substack — writer to writer/writer to subscriber/subscriber to subscriber — have helped the company gather more than 100,000 paying subscribers quickly.

To sum it up, products with inherent virality are essentially platforms that enable people to build new communities around UGC that are sustainable and autonomous.

Whenever you need inspirations for virality design, look no further. Just think about virus:

• Virus: a platform for creating self-sufficient communities
• Environment: Product/Market Fit
• Hosts: users/creators
• Replication: user-generated networks supported by a monetization model
• Transmission: creator to user, user to user, creator to creator

P.S. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are all platforms that produce UGC and allow users to create their communities of sorts. What’s set Ning and Substack apart is the personalization and monetization of the communities. When content generates value, people are willing to pay for it. It’s time to rethink the advertising-supported free content model!