Unleash Your Ideavirus - Part Two

Trap #2: They stop thinking of themselves as fashion editors and start to believe that they are fashion makers. Rather than acting like people who have a sense of which virus will hit the hive next, they believe that they are respected enough by the hive to force it to accept what they believe should be the next virus.

Your business faces the challenge of finding or training a fashion editor. Launching products too early is just as bad as launching them too late: If you miss the timing, you fail to fill the vacuum with your virus. Miss the timing, and the profit belongs to someone who has better timing and better fashion sense than you have.

The Money Paradox: The Sooner You Ask for It, the Less You'll Make

The single biggest mistake that an idea merchant can make is to ask for money too soon. On one hand, you want to charge early and often, so that you can cash in on people who are just looking, and so that you can maximize your income before your idea fades. On the other hand, early money introduces a huge amount of friction into the system. Many idea merchants require people to pay the most when they know the least. Why don't book publishers release a book first in paperback, which is cheap and thus more likely to be bought by a curious reader, and then replace it with a hardcover once they know that everyone is clamoring for a copy? Today, if you want to taste a new book, you have to pay $25 for the privilege.

On the Internet, dozens of new businesses have discovered how important this issue is. For example, eFax.com, a service that lets you get faxes delivered to your email box, launched as a free service. Why? Because it's scary enough to be one of the first people to try something as flaky as eliminating your fax machine. How many people would be willing to pay money for the privilege?

So eFax has a plan: Get people hooked on a free system. Build an ideavirus. Then upgrade people to a paid system that offers all sorts of extras. Fill the vacuum. Achieve lock-in. Extract revenue.

In that order!

Will eFax be guaranteed an easy upgrade path? I have no idea. Some businesses -- such as email -- will be stuck at "free" forever, making the whole journey hard to justify.

The challenge, of course, is to figure out which businesses have a payoff at the end. And it's important to be patient enough to wait for the right moment, to introduce the friction of charging money at just the right time.

In very transparent markets like the Internet, the fear is that all ideaviruses will be so competitive that you'll never be able to extract money. That's why the race to fill the vacuum is so intense. If you can fill the vacuum aggressively and permanently, it is far easier to extract money.

Is That Your Final Answer?

When a sneezer is ready to spread your ideavirus, what should he say?

It sounds like a simple, silly question, but it gets at the core issue of making your virus smooth. If you give sneezers easy-to-follow, effective instructions, they're likely to follow them, because, after all, their goal is to spread the virus.

The producers of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire have Regis Philbin repeat the catchphrase "Is that your final answer?" almost to distraction. Though the question was created for legal reasons, it has become a smooth tool for sneezers who want to spread the virus. I must have heard the phrase 50 times, and read it in newspaper columns almost as many times, before I saw the show for the first time.

By giving loyal watchers a five-word catchphrase, the producers created a powerful shorthand for referencing the show. Hotmail has done the same thing with its free email service. The bottom of every Hotmail message contains simple instructions for getting the service. And because the instructions appear automatically, the sneezer doesn't have to do a thing to put them there.

It's important that you do not leave to chance the critical matter of the catchphrase or the instructions for spreading the virus. Why run the risk of having sneezers spread the wrong message? Why leave the possibility of mixed or conflicting messages? If you make the language fun and accessible, and the instructions easy and automatic, you increase the smoothness and speed of your ideavirus.

No, You Go First!

The problem with a new idea is that very few people want to go first. Who was the first person to swim in the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts after years of it being off-limits for health reasons? Who were the first parents to give their kid the measles vaccine? Which company chose to be the first to file its taxes electronically?

One of the key reasons to launch an ideavirus is that you can give people a risk-free, cost-free way to check out the safety of your idea before they commit. More importantly, you can create an aura around your idea -- an aura of inevitability, of invincibility. When everyone is buzzing about a new technique, tactic, musical style, club, or food -- whatever -- it's easier to put fear aside and try it.