You have four types of loops: Viral loops, content loops, paid loops and sales loops.
Organic virality could be word of mouth or when people share our product online because they enjoy the experience. People tweeting our our placeholder text would be an example of an organic viral loop.
Then there’s viral loops that result from natural usage. We have the ability to share a draft of thread. If someone shares a link they are looping other people into the product just by using it to do what it normally.
Finally you have incentivised loops. We could incentive people inviting others to the platform, either with a free trial or with access to new beta features. I think exploring invites will make more sense when we add team features.
The idea with a viral loop is that the more frequent the trigger the more powerful the loop. Inviting people on sign up happens once whereas sharing drafts could happen multiple times a week.
Content Loops
Products can have user generated content, like a social media platforms, or company generated content, like a news outlet.
Content can then be shared by the user or by the company. An example of user-generated, user-shared loop would be Vimeo. People create video content for their platform then they also go out and embed the content on websites. On the other hand, an example of user generated content where the company shares it would be Quora. Users answer question and then the company packages the answers up to get indexed by search engines.
User generated content ideas we could try for Chirr app could include:
- Indexing most popular threads in our system and then quote retweeting them each week. Our twitter account then becomes a source of great threads, people read the, some of them sign up for Chirr, and a percentage of them create new threads for us to retweet.
- We could also create SEO pages for pages that contain thread of threads around key terms. For example, if there’s an SEO opportunity for ‘how to negotiate a better salary’ we could search for all the best threads that offer excellent advice on the topic and organise them on a chirr app page that we optimise for the key term.
In addition to user generated content, you have company generated content. This is just content marketing. This only qualifies as a loop if a portion of the profits are reinvested in creating more content. If I just make content for the product it’s not a content loop. If the content drives enough subscription for us to reinvest in hiring an agency people to generate more content then its a loop that can compound over time.
An example of company generated content that relies on users sharing it would be something like the New York Times or Buzz feed. On the other hand WebMD is an example of a company creating their own content and then working to get it indexed by search engines.
Examples of content we could explore
- Chirr versus competitor pages
- Walkthroughs of related products
- Power lists of other twitter or publishing tools
- Mega guides to producing content and writing threads
Technically we could share the content and encourage users to share it would count as company shared and user shared. The difference here is really in the volume, Buzz feed and NYT produces enough content on a daily basis that they can rely on user sharing as their primary outreach method. We would take a long time to product everlasting content and we can ask people to share it but our primary method of getting it out there would be putting in the work to get it ranked by search engines.
Paid loops and just advertising. It’s only a loop when we reinvest a portion of you profits back into more advertising advertising. I definitely think we should explore this but not yet. We want to put money into advertising once we have a much clearer sense of who to target and better retention so that we’re not pouring cash into a leaky bucket.
Finally there are sales loops. Again, only a loop if we reinvest the profits into hiring new sales reps. Sales loops make much more sense for higher ticket purchases. Not ideal for us since our ticket price is below $1000. However, we could explore this if we add a team plan.