7 surprising reasons going viral is easier than you think

As an entrepreneur bootstrapping your business, you know the easiest way to get to the promise land is by having your business go viral through word-of-mouth advertising. The problem is that most entrepreneurs believe that the chances of this happening amounts to winning the lottery. While this is true to a certain extent, the lottery ticket aspect of going viral is only one side of the coin.

Multi-channel viral campaigns such as what the new Superman movie used, or viral videos such as the Kobe vs. Messi viral video are great examples for you to learn from, but should not be the standard to which you measure yourself.  These type of viral campaigns obviously requires a big bank roll.  A big bankroll because bigger results are required to impact a big corporation’s bottom line.

Since you aren’t surprised that your bottom line doesn’t have as many zeros as Time Warner, here are the 7 surprising reasons why this fact alone makes going viral easier than you think:

1. Your bottom line does not require as big an impact from a viral campaign as the new Superman movie does.  Superman requires a half-million YouTube views in 2 days to go viral, a bootstrapping entrepreneur requires zero.
2. Although it would be nice for your unknown startup to get a half million Youtube views in 2 days, it is rare that this even matters in the bigger scheme of things.  YouTube views is a worthless metric for most entrepreneurs to measure. You tell me what matters more to you, the number of real customers you sign-up or the number of bored teenagres who entertain themselves watching your YouTube video?
3. Now that we have established that measuring YouTube views is worthless as well as the fact that the bar for going viral is much lower for you than it is for Superman, let’s establish what matters: Referrals. As a bootstrapping entrepreneurs the only two things that matters are 1) getting your next customer and 2) wowing that customers such that they will serve as a reference customer.
4. If you stop trying to figure out how to drive traffic to your website, squeeze page, or YouTube video and start focusing on getting real customers, you can go what I call bootstrappers viral. Bootstrappers viral is when you create a viral referral loop that gets your best customers to provide at least 3 referrals every month / quarter / year (whatever cycle fits your business), and then get at least 50% of those referrals to do the same.
5. If you can come up with a plan to close 10 customers and wow them with customer service,  it will be easy for you to go bootstrappers viral. Using the virial coefficient formula that I explain in this article, the math to go viral shows you that in just 10 cycles, you can grow to 1,799 customers.
6. Wowing someone with customer service is not hard, since by definition the average businesses provides average customer service.  All you have to do is be better than average, which is actually pretty easy.  Even easier if you learn this one simple trick I learned at a kid’s birthday party.
7. Focusing on getting 10 real customers and wowing them with customer service is much easier than getting a million views on YouTube. Especially if you do these 10 things everyday.