(2010-04-30) Mckenzie Viral Two Sided Incentives

Patrick McKenzie on designing Viral two-sided Sharing incentives. The biggest single thing about their referral program is that it has a two-sided incentive for sharing: the person who signs up for Drop Box through your referral link gets a better deal than they would have gotten from the homepage, and you also get a free bonus yourself. That is marvelous, marvelous psychology there: it gives both parties a benefit so the email seems less like spam, and social relations being what they are, the person receiving the gift feels a wee bit obligated to accept it... So I decided to test out a version of this for Bingo Card Creator. Historically, I have given free trial users 15 bingo cards for free. (This neatly segments my markets between parents, who very rarely have 16 children, and teachers and professional users, who rarely play bingo with under a dozen players.) I’m allowing them to invite friends: each successful invite gives both parties 3 extra cards, with a cap at 12 gained from inviting.

I’m used to pushing changes which only require ten lines of code, but this feature was a monster.

It turns out that getting folks to share links on FaceBook is child’s play: one line of code that you can copy/paste. With a bit more work, you can customize the text Facebook will pull out of the page.