On the myth of rapid viral growth

Interesting post by Seth Godin today, serving as an antidote to the "grow you a viral business empire in 9 1/2 weeks" school of online media consulting:

But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.

I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.

It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web. The frustrating part is that you see your tactics fail right away. The good news is that over time, you get the satisfaction of watching those tactics succeed right away.

His advice to startups:

Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that's how long it's going to take, guys.

I think this needs reiterating sometimes - if you look at most growth curves, they are "S" curves - ie there is a long initial phase where growth is not explosive, and is achieved by "just buggering on", as Winston Churchill would have put it - the daily soldiering on regardless. In fact, the maths of viral growth - the steady geometric increase of a slowly reducing % growth - is described by the S curve.


Or, in a more modern idiom, as Suw Charman notes:

We've all heard about the runaway success of memes that seem to spread across the internet almost overnight, e.g. the way the band Arctic Monkeys stormed the charts by accruing fans from the web, but those events are rare on the internet and even rarer on intranets. In reality, success comes more like it did for 90s pop band Pulp, which lead singer Jarvis Cocker once described as "an overnight success that took 16 years".

And of course, all good things come to an end - at some point growth will slow, and its time to start thinking of the new new thing.