One of the cheapest way of advertising I have heard till now is word of mouth
And conventionally we are told that make something so good that people just can’t stop talking about it
Actually I haven’t been told about any other alternative
And the paradigm of being so helpful that you talked about is very constraining for me
We live in such a complex world
There has to be another growth lever for word of mouth
And now I have finally figured out what the other one is
Virality
You have to make your product have something that is so screenshotable or worth taking a quick video to share on social media or just talk/ brag about in person
We have seen this play out in physical products a lot
Alcohol bottles like Azul, Perfumes such as Carolina Herrera Good Girl and dental brands like salt
When the product itself looks so good that sharing it on social media or talking about it with other people makes users look cool or elevates their status, it gains virality as component generating word of mouth
When the product looks visually amazing and cool people wanna share it
Because they can use that product to derive some coolness for themselves
If things are useful and give a competitive advantage people won’t talk about it it becomes a secret, But if something is cool everyone wants to talk about it and share about it because it elevates them
And this thing is not limited to physical products only
Softwares like N8N, Trading View and Cursor have simplified userflow and interactions but their UI looks techinical and cool af
That makes them a prefered choice among content creators who feature screenshots and recording from these softwares to demonstrate skill and authority in their niche.
Even if you dont know anything about trading, open a chart on trading view, shoot some video and voiceover with script form GPT and you look like someone who knows what they are talking about
There is a meme going around and a lot of people have actually pulled it off
If you have a safety vest , you can get in anywhere because people just think you have the authority to
A piece of software can act as a metaphorical Safety Vest.
It can give the user of the software the aura that this guy is doing something complicated, he knows what he’s doing and maybe I should learn from him as he knows stuff I don’t.
If I’m a guy really curious about trading and I see a Youtube thumbnail where a guy is ripping out a trading view chart with 10 different indicators and crazy colors popping
I would fall for it
I would think hey this guy is the smartest person when it comes to trading
I need to watch this video
And this is not even theory this has actually happened with other softwares also
Obsidian blew up because the diagrams it generated of your interconnected nodes looks just too crazy to ignore
Thus if you’re making software, yeah make it useful
But by just making it useful you are handicapping yourself
Insert some page Into your app where you have something really crazy going on visually
Something that when shared makes the user look cool and like an authority
A metaphorical safety vest