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Validating Free Products

I am curious to know what my fellow IH'ers thoughts are on validating free products... IMO a paid product is validated when sums of money are exchanged. Assuming retention is the same between the two, I am willing to hypothesize that free products are validated when they go viral. Virality being something that is shared at a rapid pace. It's also worth mentioning, the measure of virality is relative to the size of your community/ niche. 10 new users/ day may be a big deal when there are only a few thousand people who would consider using your product or service.

If you've developed a free product or maintain blogs, podcasts, etc, what has your experience been? How do you know that you're really on to something?

How did the folks at Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram know that they were really on to something in their early days?

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Photo by Timon Klauser on Unsplash

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    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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      I did mention that retention was assumed the same between paid and free (perhaps I should have quantified it as well). You're absolutely right though virality can be deceieving if you dont keep those users regardless of if the product is paid or free. I like the idea of using active users a metric because it combines acquired users with retention rates.

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