Product virality is not “growth magic”

How do things go viral? Things go viral because people tell other people about them. That's it. Some people share because it makes them look smart, others because they want to appear not virtuous than they are. Some share in person, others retweet or add a review on Google Maps. It doesn't matter. As long as your users tell other people, you are going viral. This means we can optimize for going viral. Make the product or feature interesting enough to share. This is what we tried to measure with NPS scores. Promotor is the key word. How many users are recommending this? Unfortunately most users are sophisticated enough to know about NPS scores now, so these results work less well than they used to. There's another measure that's equally important: Product Market Fit. When Sean Ellis wanted to measure this he wanted to find a proxy for how likely the user is to keep using the product. He found one by asking "How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?". If they are…