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Ask HN: Strategies to Catalyze Social Invites?

1 points by sp527 ↗ HN
Looking for a recommendation on resources aimed improving the invite rate on a social app. I’ve scoured the more generic and obvious sources like Hooked, Influence, and related works on behavioral psychology.

Wondering if anyone can refer me to resources having more specificity wrt this problem. Even blog posts would be great. Thanks!

2 comments

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davidjnelson
What's your seeding strategy? You could try walking around physically in a target rich environment and asking people to install it.

From my research, a great technique could be to make invites core to your product, and have both ends of the invite/accept transaction to receive a powerful brain chemical or financial reward. Did you ever get $10 to join paypal? That was a great strategy!

sp527
Haha never got the $10 personally but I’m familiar with the rationale (from Thiel/Hoffman).

So in this particular case I’m less concerned about seeding as I am about viral coefficient and viral cycle time. I’m not seeing the metrics I want yet, so looking for ways to boost them. I think the fundamentals are working but it’s clearly not enough to leave network growth to the whims of users. They’ll often fail to bring others in even if they would like to. But by contrast I want the motivation to be organic and not necessarily a product of dark patterns or incessant prodding (imo in the best case these besmirch the app’s appeal and in the worst contribute to churn).

Without getting specific, our app is already naturally amenable to friend invites - that was a prerequisite we considered before even scoping a prototype. So really just need to add fuel to a solid platform now.