The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book, Viral Loop: From Facebook To Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves.
Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build an insanely fast-growing business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will flock to throw money at you.
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a “viral loop”—to use it, you have to spread it. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.
In Viral Loop, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses—some worth billions of dollars—that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them.
One such business was Hotmail. After their 20th venture capitalist meeting, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, former hardware engineers at Apple who first came up with the idea for webmail, finally raised seed money from famed VC firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Microsoft’s new ajax Hotmail client, called Kahuna, is 
Company: 
Back to Kahuna, Imran has posted additional screen shots and information on the service. He had a 
Kahuna (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team (
