PR#4 Lauch
User commitment over user acquisition. PayPal did this smartly. It even created bots to buy product from eBay which insisted PayPal.
The Heart of platform marketing : Design for viral growth.
The pull strategy over push is more effective. Awareness alone will not drive adoption. Marketing needs to be baked into product.
WAYS to Lauch a Platform
Even platform that are in direct competition needs to lauch different strategy to carve out unique position. YouTube incentivise content creator. Mega upload focus on users. Vimeo on high quality producer.
Cardinal points of strategies -
- Staging the value creation: huffington post did this by creating high quality article by writers.
- Design the platform to attract one set of users.
- Simultaneous on-boarding - even when the overall size of network is small the value unit can created
Strategies -
1. Follow the rabbit - use a non-platform demonstration, amazon.
2. The pigybank strategy - connect with an existing user base from a different platform and stage creation of value unit in order to recruite users to participate in your platform. PayPal on ebay. Airbnb on Craigslist. Youtube on MySpace.
3. The seeding strategy - create the value unit that is relevant to one set of user. In many cases company becomes the first producers. Adobe to federal government. Seeding is done by fake value unit. Quora editor asked and answered question by themself.
4. The marquee - provide incentive to attract key user set to the platform. In many cases single group of users are fundamental. Halo for Microsoft.
5. The single size strategy - start with sigle side and then later convert in both. Redbus booking system.
6. The producer evangelism - design the platform to attract producer who can induce their customer to become users. Skillshare with Seth godin.
7. The Big Bang adoption - one or more traditional push marketing, jack dorsey installed the big TVS.
8. The micro market - start by targeting tiny market. This enable platform to provide effective matchmaking of a large market in early stage. Facebook by geography, stackoverflow by category.
THE VIRAL GROWTH - user to user lauch -
A host, germ, medium, recipient. The sender, value unit, the external network, the recipient. When instagram share on facebook, encouraging users to become memeber.