Figuring Out Flywheels

[Andy Black]

Thought I'd create a thread where we can discuss flywheels and how we're applying them to our businesses.

I'll keep this opening post updated with a summary and insights.


A simple flywheel to get more clients:

One of my friends has a simple flywheel to grow the small carpet cleaning business he runs with his wife. They close the loop by asking happy clients to leave a review.

They ask as they're leaving the property, which is when the client is most delighted with the result and most likely to leave a glowing review.

If they agree to leave a review then my friend makes a big deal of texting links to where they can leave the Google and Facebook reviews, asking them to check they got the text on their phone, and asking them to check the links work. (This now means they're stood in front of him with the review open, having promised to leave a review.)

My friend and his wife then hop into their van and bid a cheery farewell.

Those new reviews help rank his business higher on Google My Business (the Google map), which brings more clients.

This is his simple flywheel where he turns happy clients into more happy clients.


Rules for flywheels:

From the second of the podcasts linked to below, Nathan Barry (the founder of ConvertKit) gives his three rules for a flywheel. I'm paraphrasing for the moment till I go back and get his exact wording:

1. It's a smooth transition between stages.
2. Each turn is easier than the last.
3. Each turn produces more than the last.

Podcasts:

• The $300M Founder That Lives on a Farm and Flies Planes
• Creator Flywheels: Scale Your Business the Smart Way

Let's get a discussion going:

• What flywheels do you have in your business?
• What flywheels are you creating?

 

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[Andy Black]

A simple flywheel I'm going to test is where some of my longer LinkedIn posts lead people to an email newsletter.

In emails I'll direct people to some of the new posts on LinkedIn. As the subscriber count grows then more people get directed back to my LinkedIn posts. My thinking is this will get more initial engagement on LinkedIn posts and ideally spark initial conversations in the comments since email subscribers should be the most engaged anyway.

I'll also setup an autoresponder series for new subscribers where they are directed to past LinkedIn essays, which will increase the views and engagement of those posts over time, and may keep them active for longer in the LinkedIn feed.

Obviously I won't do this for every post on LinkedIn, but for the ones that seemed to resonate more with people.

 

[EarlOfChina]

A simple flywheel I'm going to test is where some of my longer LinkedIn posts lead people to an email newsletter.

In emails I'll direct people to some of the new posts on LinkedIn. As the subscriber count grows then more people get directed back to my LinkedIn posts. My thinking is this will get more initial engagement on LinkedIn posts and ideally spark initial conversations in the comments since email subscribers should be the most engaged anyway.

I'll also setup an autoresponder series for new subscribers where they are directed to past LinkedIn essays, which will increase the views and engagement of those posts over time, and may keep them active for longer in the LinkedIn feed.

Obviously I won't do this for every post on LinkedIn, but for the ones that seemed to resonate more with people.

Really like the idea of this. Keep us posted on how it goes.

What does your signup page look like for this?

 

[ZCP]

Jim Collins - Concepts - The Flywheel Effect

Jim Collins - Books - Turning the Flywheel

 

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[Andy Black]

Jim Collins - Concepts - The Flywheel Effect

Jim Collins - Books - Turning the Flywheel

Thanks @ZCP

You might like those podcasts I linked to.

 

[savefox]

I have them scan a QR code and open a review page in front of me while I'm wrapping up the equipment. Then they get a text with a link to leave a review. Then my VA calls every customer the next day to get feedback and sends them a review link again

 

[cmh]

I read both of Collins' books and thought they were worthwhile.

Initially, I was confused by the flywheel concept because I was overthinking it. It's truly just building momentum by small actions. The difficult part here is in first choosing the correct flywheel to push on, and secondly being able to assess whether or not your actions are having the desired effect, while also assessing whether your flywheel is correct at all.

I find it a balance between trying to stick to my core competencies as a company, versus being agile enough to capitalize on opportunities. In my case, if the new opportunity is adjacent to my core competencies, I'll go for it.

One thing to keep in mind about these business books is that, taken as a whole, they often contradict each other and themselves. Ultimately, if you win, a business author will be able to give some theoretical reason as to why. If you lose, same. As an example, if my business takes on an opportunity that is not exactly in our wheelhouse, and it works out, I will be praised for being nimble. If the new opportunity fails, it will be because I "lost focus on my flywheel," etc.

 

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[Andy Black]

I read both of Collins' books and thought they were worthwhile.

Initially, I was confused by the flywheel concept because I was overthinking it. It's truly just building momentum by small actions. The difficult part here is in first choosing the correct flywheel to push on, and secondly being able to assess whether or not your actions are having the desired effect, while also assessing whether your flywheel is correct at all.

I find it a balance between trying to stick to my core competencies as a company, versus being agile enough to capitalize on opportunities. In my case, if the new opportunity is adjacent to my core competencies, I'll go for it.

One thing to keep in mind about these business books is that, taken as a whole, they often contradict each other and themselves. Ultimately, if you win, a business author will be able to give some theoretical reason as to why. If you lose, same. As an example, if my business takes on an opportunity that is not exactly in our wheelhouse, and it works out, I will be praised for being nimble. If the new opportunity fails, it will be because I "lost focus on my flywheel," etc.

Thanks for this.

I haven't read the books and probably won't because I thought the two podcasts with Nathan Barry were super insightful and actionable (hint hint). I'll watch the video this week too.

 

[BigRomeDawg]

A content flywheel I love is when you get enough comments/messages that ask questions or suggest content. So you don't have to think of what content to make, anymore.

 

[BigRomeDawg]

I also think social media in general becomes a flywheel at a certain point. Where your momentum is so great that you could basically stop posting for a year and keep growing anyway.

 

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[Andy Black]

Really like the idea of this. Keep us posted on how it goes.

What does your signup page look like for this?

The signup page isn't great, but it's not that relevant. I think of it as a checkout page. People read something on LinkedIn and see a little CTA at the end to signup if they want more of the same.

 

[Andy Black]

I also think social media in general becomes a flywheel at a certain point. Where your momentum is so great that you could basically stop posting for a year and keep growing anyway.

I think that might work on YouTube. I'm not so sure about other platforms.

I suspect James Jani's YouTube channel still grows even if he posts infrequently. My own YouTube channel seems to keep slowly growing and I've not posted for months. All my social media platforms stop as soon as I stop posting. It could be a critical mass thing, but then flywheels eventually stop if there's no input.

I like Nathan Barry's rules for a flywheel as mentioned in the second podcast:

1. It's a smooth transition between stages.
2. Each turn is easier than the last.
3. Each turn produces more than the last.

 

[Andy Black]

Very small "win" just now:

Published a LinkedIn post today then sent a newsletter linking to the post to my small email list of 221 people.

I can see 5 subscribers clicked through so far, and I can see one of them Liked the post.

Sure, he may have seen the post in his feed at some stage, but maybe won't have. My LinkedIn posts typically get 500-2,000 impressions with my 12k followers.

Maybe this is the start of a little content flywheel. We'll see...

 

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[Andy Black]

Pretty detailed flywheel.

I love how they engaged with the market in hand-to-hand combat in their first 12 months.

Nathan Barry on LinkedIn: This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to…

This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to $98k in MRR in 12 months with direct sales.

www.linkedin.com

 

[Black_Dragon43]

Pretty detailed flywheel.

I love how they engaged with the market in hand-to-hand combat in their first 12 months.

Nathan Barry on LinkedIn: This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to…

This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to $98k in MRR in 12 months with direct sales.

www.linkedin.com

View attachment 55308

This isn’t really a flywheel tbh.

A flywheel is two independent processes feeding into each other. This is just one process. Here’s an example from Amazon:



Sellers -> Selection -> Customer Experience -> Traffic -> Sellers is Amazon’s internal business model.

Lower cost structure -> lower prices is the external process Amazon uses to “SPEED UP” the internal business process by a whole different array of factors. Initially this was negotiating volume discounts, now it is through their massive shipping infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the key to Nathan’s success above imo was the strategy… go after BIG influential users from the beginning. Notice the “identify top creators” bit. While me and you are chasing average Joe, Nathan was chasing the top. Why?

Not because that’s where the profit is, afterall, the top is small, and they don’t pay any better… but rather because people follow “influencers” like sheep. If the influencer uses X, they use it too. That’s how brokies behave, and it’s the brokies that account for most of his profits.

So this actually is a flywheel — but not like the one Nathan drew up. Drawing the real one would, however, be politically incorrect.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

Here’s a flywheel I use for my clients when it comes to growing an agency.

Running your sales process, doing the work, getting results, and securing testimonials is the internal process of every agency out there. The big agencies have referrals and testimonials from big companies, which attracts them big companies yet again and many of them don’t even need to do anything else.

Small agencies though, the brokies (if you’re under $10M you go in that category too), need to progressively level up. Initially you start working for small companies, and if you do well, you level up slowly and inch towards the big boys. I know a guy who started his web design agency in the 90s. He’s a relatively bigger dog now, does $3M. In 30 years!

The point here is that just running your internal process for an agency is a terribly slow way to grow. That’s why you need to turn it into a flywheel… where you take your case studies/results, you use them to position yourself as an authority, you use the authority positioning to generate BETTER leads, and set appointments with top-tier clients who pay a lot more, and hence accelerate your internal processes so you look more like the big guys faster, rather than the brokies.

Bigger clients get you bigger testimonials which get you more bigger clients.

Now I should add that this works very well for my clients but it’s limited for me. Because in my case I don’t “upgrade” to better clients. I just get more of the same clients, more easily. And sure, up to a point, more case studies, etc helps. But up to a point only.

For example, if I show you 20 case studies where agencies generated $1M+ with us, that is impressive. But if I show you 30 instead of 20, it’s basically the same. The extra 10 don’t really move the needle.

 

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[Andy Black]

I don't think a flywheel has to have two processes. It's just a loop that spins faster. Think of an actual flywheel used to pump water. You turn it and it gets faster and easier to turn and more water gets pumped out.

You're right in that Nathan didn't explain how his flywheel spins faster. Going after clients with big followings who recommend his product to their followers is the smart part he missed out. Not sure why he did that.

What I like is how they engaged people 1-2-1 right from the start.

I'd say you've built a flywheel too if over time it gets easier to get the same type of clients. I don't think you have to change the type of clients for it to be a flywheel.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

I'd say you've built a flywheel too if over time it gets easier to get the same type of clients. I don't think you have to change the type of clients for it to be a flywheel.

It does get easier, but there are diminishing returns, at least until I become a more dominant influencer in the space. For example, if I apply the same strategies I used last year, I won’t be able to 10x my growth.

So I don’t consider it a flywheel in my case because there is no exponential effect. It’s still linear.

Exponential effect would mean I can sign up 100 clients in a month this year, rather than 100 in a year. That’s not possible with the same process. Because while sales does become easier, it becomes easier in a linear fashion.

To become exponential I’d need to figure out a process to get a lot more refferals OR find a way to tap into other people’s audiences, none of which I have yet figured out.

I have a very easy time to sell now — the problem is generating an exponentially bigger volume of leads. The volume of leads is what restricts my growth. Because the sales process can only be so good… once you start closing 60-70% on sales calls as I do now, there’s only marginal gains I can make there.

Also…

I don't think a flywheel has to have two processes

I think the idea here is that one process spins by itself due to its momentum (internal process) and it’s the external one that accelerates it, so it starts spinning exponentially faster. So your question “how does it spin faster?” has two answers in a flywheel… the wheel’s internal momentum, PLUS some external factor which accelerates it.

If you just have the internal momentum which makes it easier, then you still have a linear effect, and not really an exponential effect as you see with flywheels.

 

[Andy Black]

I have a very easy time to sell now — the problem is generating an exponentially bigger volume of leads. The volume of leads is what restricts my growth.

What do you come up with if you ask yourself:

"How can I get exponentially more leads?"

or

"How can I get 10x more leads?"

I think the idea here is that one process spins by itself due to its momentum (internal process) and it’s the external one that accelerates it, so it starts spinning exponentially faster. So your question “how does it spin faster?” has two answers in a flywheel… the wheel’s internal momentum, PLUS some external factor which accelerates it.

Yeah, the energy from the person turning the flywheel is what got it up to speed and keeps it going. The person pushing the handle on the flywheel turns it very slowly at first, but each subsequent revolution gets faster (until it physically reaches the maximium speed a person can turn the wheel).


In my case I'd like to build little "Google Ads funnels" that get people into a system that then gets more people into the system.

I imagine it's like a small stream at the top of a large water wheel.

To date I get that steady stream of leads into a business, but it's capped at the number of daily visitors I can get to a page. There's only so many people searching a day.

But if I can get it so each lead brings another lead, then it will grow exponentially.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

In my case I'd like to build little "Google Ads funnels" that get people into a system that then gets more people into the system.

I imagine it's like a small stream at the top of a large water wheel.

To date I get that steady stream of leads into a business, but it's capped at the number of daily visitors I can get to a page. There's only so many people searching a day.

But if I can get it so each lead brings another lead, then it will grow exponentially

Yes this is a smart move. So you already have a process up and running to generate the leads. Now you need another process to get the leads to bring in other people — a process that ideally does not require further input.

This is the “hard” part because people have such short attention spans, so the reason to do something needs to be VERY compelling & urgent.

So what are they going to get if they bring someone else? One idea is get your newsletter promoted by big hitters. Assuming you can get multiple ones to do it, you’ll build a large list, and you can use it to promote each one to each other’s audience in return. Far-fetched idea, but it needs to be to get you the scale you need to make this exponential.

What do you come up with if you ask yourself:

"How can I get exponentially more leads?"

or

"How can I get 10x more leads?"

Well here are a few ideas I’ve brainstormed, with my notes under each one:

• Spend time searching for people who will do outreach on your behalf.
— strategy is already working, you just do it at bigger scale, less dependent on your time. Likely to result in a decrease in lead quality at least initially.

• Get influencers to promote you.
— They already have the audience, so assuming they’re happy to introduce you to their audience, you’d be reaching out 1:many to people who already have their attention captured and where the trust factor is already in place.

• Ad funnel for booking calls + additional salespeople
— Likely to lead to very expensive calls booked prices, which would require raising price on service. But would save time and could scale just via money instead of time.

• Participate in highly active groups of agency owners without getting banned
— Again, you build a flywheel/reputation, but risk is getting banned. I did this without any self-promotion before, for example on r/agency on reddit and still got banned. People get jealous.

• Crowd effect — audience gets so big it attracts others by itself.
— Aim to produce content that goes viral like say Matt Lakajev or Justin Welsh, so you get a large crowd effect going. Basically become a full-time influencer.

• (long term) build email list and keep re-marketing to them
— People who are interested in lead magnets are often not good buyers. At least not in the next 3-months. Some of them can become buyers 1-year or so down the line. I’m having a few of those now.

• Offer a free trial (ie much better offer), with the same strategy — outreach
— Reduced barrier to entry = bigger volume, but it’s also likely to lead to a lot of calls booked by unqualified people who would need to be turned away.

What are your thoughts? Which seem to have highest probability to help?

 

[amp0193]

I sell a customer a bike.

Then ask them to review it.

If they leave a glowing 5 star review I ask if they’d like to be a local ambassador for us.

They then go on our website as a place you can test ride one of our bikes and they also send us some nice photos.

Because there are more places to test ride, we sell more bikes. I can also use the photos to generate social media organic and ad content to generate more top of funnel awareness.

And so on

 

[NervesOfSteel]

Thought I'd create a thread where we can discuss flywheels and how we're applying them to our businesses.

I'll keep this opening post updated with a summary and insights.


A simple flywheel to get more clients:

One of my friends has a simple flywheel to grow the small carpet cleaning business he runs with his wife. They close the loop by asking happy clients to leave a review.

They ask as they're leaving the property, which is when the client is most delighted with the result and most likely to leave a glowing review.

If they agree to leave a review then my friend makes a big deal of texting links to where they can leave the Google and Facebook reviews, asking them to check they got the text on their phone, and asking them to check the links work. (This now means they're stood in front of him with the review open, having promised to leave a review.)

My friend and his wife then hop into their van and bid a cheery farewell.

Those new reviews help rank his business higher on Google My Business (the Google map), which brings more clients.

This is his simple flywheel where he turns happy clients into more happy clients.


Rules for flywheels:

From the second of the podcasts linked to below, Nathan Barry (the founder of ConvertKit) gives his three rules for a flywheel. I'm paraphrasing for the moment till I go back and get his exact wording:

1. It's a smooth transition between stages.
2. Each turn is easier than the last.
3. Each turn produces more than the last.

Podcasts:

• The $300M Founder That Lives on a Farm and Flies Planes
• Creator Flywheels: Scale Your Business the Smart Way

Let's get a discussion going:

• What flywheels do you have in your business?
• What flywheels are you creating?

Great thread Sir!

 

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[Andy Black]

Yes this is a smart move. So you already have a process up and running to generate the leads. Now you need another process to get the leads to bring in other people — a process that ideally does not require further input.

This is the “hard” part because people have such short attention spans, so the reason to do something needs to be VERY compelling & urgent.

So what are they going to get if they bring someone else? One idea is get your newsletter promoted by big hitters. Assuming you can get multiple ones to do it, you’ll build a large list, and you can use it to promote each one to each other’s audience in return. Far-fetched idea, but it needs to be to get you the scale you need to make this exponential.

I'll figure it out for newsletters. I was more wondering how could I do it for my Google Ads consulting clients. Instead of setting up a funnel that brings them a fixed (ish) number of leads a month, can I setup a funnel that feeds a flywheel that brings more and more leads a month? That would be a valuable skill that would build valuable assets.

Well here are a few ideas I’ve brainstormed, with my notes under each one:

• Spend time searching for people who will do outreach on your behalf.
— strategy is already working, you just do it at bigger scale, less dependent on your time. Likely to result in a decrease in lead quality at least initially.

• Get influencers to promote you.
— They already have the audience, so assuming they’re happy to introduce you to their audience, you’d be reaching out 1:many to people who already have their attention captured and where the trust factor is already in place.

• Ad funnel for booking calls + additional salespeople
— Likely to lead to very expensive calls booked prices, which would require raising price on service. But would save time and could scale just via money instead of time.

• Participate in highly active groups of agency owners without getting banned
— Again, you build a flywheel/reputation, but risk is getting banned. I did this without any self-promotion before, for example on r/agency on reddit and still got banned. People get jealous.

• Crowd effect — audience gets so big it attracts others by itself.
— Aim to produce content that goes viral like say Matt Lakajev or Justin Welsh, so you get a large crowd effect going. Basically become a full-time influencer.

• (long term) build email list and keep re-marketing to them
— People who are interested in lead magnets are often not good buyers. At least not in the next 3-months. Some of them can become buyers 1-year or so down the line. I’m having a few of those now.

• Offer a free trial (ie much better offer), with the same strategy — outreach
— Reduced barrier to entry = bigger volume, but it’s also likely to lead to a lot of calls booked by unqualified people who would need to be turned away.

What are your thoughts? Which seem to have highest probability to help?

Good brainstorming. Some of these sort of overlap with each other I think.

I'd approach it by thinking about Jay Abraham's question:

"Who already has your clients?"


You help agencies scale?

What do agency owners looking to scale already spend their money or time on trying to scale?

What channels on YouTube do they follow? Who on LinkedIn do they follow? What courses, groups, masterminds, services, software, tools, newsletters, etc do they already pay for?

Who has gathered together a community of your ideal clients, either as a formal community (like a Facebook group or forum), or as an informal community around their posts online (like in the comments on social media posts)?

Who would want you to succeed at growing agencies?

I don't know because I don't really follow the agency space or content online, but I'll give you my thinking behind what I'm doing on LinkedIn:

As you know I'm running a test to grow a newsletter with Google Ads. I'd like to then see if I can use Sparkloop to get paid for referring my subscribers to other newsletters in the Sparkloop network.

I figure if I can do that then Sparkloop would be pretty interested in getting me to help other newsletters grow using Sparkloop.

So I've occasionally tagged Sparkloop in some of my LinkedIn posts and one of their employees and a co-founder have replied to one of the posts.

I've then ended up in DM with the employee.

IF I can get it working, it will be in their interest for me to do it for more newsletters. They have an audience of newsletter operators who could avail of my service, and this is likely to keep growing.

I should probably test using ConvertKit and Beehiiv to get on their radars too. Again, if I can grow ConvertKit or Beehiiv newsletters using Google Ads then I suspect they'll be interested in more newsletters doing the same. And I suspect both those platforms are set to keep growing, and maybe exponentially.

That's me thinking about who already has my clients AND would also love to see me succeed.

Can you do something similar?

 

[cmh]

My following comment might seem pedantic, but I assure you it is not.

A flywheel's momentum is not an exponential equation. Exponential growth is not required or expected when we talk about a flywheel. The point is simply that prior actions add to the flywheel's momentum. They key to a flywheel is that the prior actions accumulate in some way.

Most business activities can feed into a flywheel with a bit of thought, testing, and refinement of the process.

 

[cYn]

I love the flywheel concept.

I don't disagree with anyone here on the concept. I think we all get the point; to continue or accelerate the flywheel's momentum.

Leads > Appointments > Sales > Referrals > Leads.

This system alone usually doesn't continue the momentum because it's difficult to get the same amount of Referrals as we do Leads. That means we might add another wheel to help put more force on the Referrals system.

What happens if your product/service is so good that your Referrals system generates more leads than your Leads system? Then you essentially have a fusion reactor that outputs more than its input. You have a productocracy.

 

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[Andy Black]

I'd not done anything to promote my $25/mth membership for a while, then started posting to LinkedIn in March.

I didn't expect it to affect signups so much:

• Nov-23 ... 2 signups
• Jan-24 ... 3 signups
• Feb-24 ... 3 signups
• Mar-24 ... 6 signups
• Apr-24 ... 8 signups (and it's only the 18th of April)

Interestingly, it also appears to have massively reduced churn.

Before I started posting updates to LinkedIn people were signing up at about the same rate they were churning, which I was fine with as this was on the backburner.

Previously I didn't send many emails to members, and they weren't always about the nuts and bolts of the topic (they were more about how to get clients as a freelancer for my topic).

Now I started a personal project using my skillset and am posting updates on LinkedIn. I then send an email to everyone with a bit of blurb then a link to the LinkedIn post so they can read more.

I think this is what's stopped the churn. People are getting lots more emails than previously (ever day or few), and they want to stay subscribed to keep getting them. Plus the emails are very relevant to the course.

And I think those posts on LinkedIn are what are getting people to signup to my free newsletter and then my paid membership.

Note that I don't think I'm getting paid signups direct from LinkedIn. People know me in this forum, then follow me on LinkedIn for a bit, and then seem to end up signing up. I know this because I email every single signup by hand to thank them for signing up, and to ask how they found out about my courses.

Here's what I normally email new paid members:

Subject: Thanks for signing up to <membership> <firstname>!

Body:
I hope the course lessons help. Let me know if you have any queries.

I'm super curious how you found out about the courses, and what type of business you're hoping to grow with <topic>.

Andy

...

When I send my updates to my email list I often get people replying with further questions (either as emails or as replies to my LinkedIn post.

I screenshot those questions and then reply via a LinkedIn post, and then send an email to my list explaining what someone asked and linking to my reply on LinkedIn.

I mention the person's first name in my email and post, but not their surname in case they want that to be confidential.


I think I've the beginning of a flywheel here:

Posting content on LinkedIn is helping bring paid members.

Those paid members then get emails directing them to posts on LinkedIn where they can engage and help it get a bit of traction (this isn't happening so much at the moment so I've to figure out how to improve that).

Some paid members ask questions which I answer on LinkedIn and send an email directing folks back to that post on LinkedIn.

Also, the more subscribers I have the more questions I get and the more LinkedIn posts and emails I send which seems to keep people as members longer.

Phew, hope that made sense, and helps!

EDIT:

Note that I have a free newsletter as well as my paid membership in New Zenler. Some people signup to the free newsletter first before signing up to the paid membership. Most seem to go straight to paid.

I send most of my emails to everyone on both lists. Even if they're on the free newsletter and never going to signup to paid I figure I get a value exchange: they get free info and I hopefully get some engagement on my LinkedIn post.


EDIT2:

Another signup this morning, so that's 9 for Apr as of 19-Apr-24.

Also, this isn't about LinkedIn. It's more about posting the bulk of your free content to social media and sending emails directing people to those posts on social media. If Facebook is more your thing then try that.

 

[realbillperry]

So in the case of Hotmail, and how they originally went "viral" by adding “Get your own free Hotmail at www.hotmail.com” at the end of each email users sent, is that an example of being a Flywheel?

Or more just a viral/network effect?

 

[Andy Black]

So in the case of Hotmail, and how they originally went "viral" by adding “Get your own free Hotmail at www.hotmail.com” at the end of each email users sent, is that an example of being a Flywheel?

Or more just a viral/network effect?

I love that example.

I think it's probably a flywheel in that the more people who signed up to hotmail and sent emails, the more people signed up.

Although I don't think we should get too hung up on definitions. It's about whether we can get better than linear growth with the same input.

 

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[realbillperry]

I don't think we should get too hung up on definitions

I can see how easy that is to get hung up.

Another example I read about years ago was a budding band (forgot the band name by now), where part of their "grassroots" marketing campaign was to go to thrift stores and find CDs by other bands in their same genre.

They'd list these CDs individually on eBay. Each time they shipped a CD to a buyer, they'd slip a business card inside the CD case with their band info.

Basic message like "Check us out at (url)!" and might even have included a QR code or something.

So each sale got them potentially introduced to listeners most likely to also like their music.

Definitely flywheel there as each sale of related music on eBay of other bands could potentially lead the people to tell their own friends with similar music taste.

Excellent idea, something I'd expect as part of a Geurilla Marketing campaign for sure.

 

[Andy Black]

Matt Paulson has an email list of 4.5m and is at $40m/year

He mentions snowballing in this short video. Similar concept:

Matt Paulson on LinkedIn: How to Grow Your Email List to 4 Million Subscribers

How to Grow Your Email List to 4 Million Subscribers

www.linkedin.com