Experiment with virality.

Making a product viral is not an overnight success. It’s not one miraculous discovery. Instead, it’s hard work and experimentation. It’s science.

Many top services like Dropbox, Uber, and Linkedin did thousands experiments, and they discovered these principles.

Virality is controlled by three factors:

1. Payload—number of people to whom each user will likely send the promotion at a time.

2. Conversion rate—how many people have been invited to try your product.

3. Frequency—how many times people are exposed to the invites.

Remember these principles if you are working on making your product viral:

1. The most important thing is to have a great product that people will be likely to share to the friends.

2. The best virality practices are based on network effects. This means that if a user invites a friend, the user’s experience with the product will be a little bit better—just like with Facebook or Snapchat.

3. Incentives work very well, especially when they are related to the product and offered to both invitees and inviters.

4. People should be invited to your core product, not an add-on. They should land on your main page.

5. Invited people don’t necessarily know what your product is about. Welcoming them with a registration form is a bad idea.

6. Making a product viral requires constant and extensive experimentation.