The turbo button is my way of saying something that grows the company fast. Something that takes you from growing to grown.

Some quick examples to emphasize my point;

• Skype – bundled with Kazaa to get it’s first couple of hundred 1,000 installs.
• Spreets – partnered with Brands Exclusive to grow from 10,000′s to 100,000′s.
• Google – partnered with Yahoo to provide their backfill of search results.
• Youtube – was the embedded video default for Myspace.

Viral marketing, word of mouth, SEO and PR are excellent starting and supporting customer acquisition methods, but it is very hard to control and really accelerate them fast. Interestingly, businesses like Facebook accelerated word of mouth by physically restricting their focus – i.e. only Harvard, only US colleges, etc.

Important: Do not press the turbo button before you are ready.

If you try and grow before you’ve got a working, scalable business model then you just have a lot more unprofitable customers and your bounce rate is going to be huge. This is often the effect of Techcrunch coverage. 10,000 visitors but no customers.

Also Important: Do not wait forever or for perfection to hit it.

Equally you can’t put it off till everything is 100% done. It’s too late. My rough rule of thumb is to be 30% confident before you start customer development, 60% confident before you start product development and 80% confident before you hit the turbo button.

It’s tough to plan for early, because there is a lot to do before your ready to ‘push the button’. But it’s good to think of some options, here are some to start you off;

1. Google, Facebook, etc ads – these can be highly targeted and ramped up and down very quickly. Expensive but can get you big fast.
2. Distribution partnerships – find someone who has a very large number of your customers and do a deal with them. You’ll either have to give them a big cut or pay them a lot – because they are big and you aren’t. This could take the form of:
   1. Promotion – giving you lots of ad inventory.
   2. Email – a big list that you get promoted to.
   3. Downloads – a bundled offer.
   4. Upsell – add your product as a ‘would you like fries with that’ option in the sales process.

So get out there, get it working and then get ready for super growth. It’s hard before you get there (getting it working), then it’s hard after you hit the button (dealing with lots of customers). Welcome to the job.

The conference was hosted by MIH SWAT – a division of Naspers with the mission to connect the technology strategies of the web businesses in their portfolio. Over the 3 days we heard inspiring talks from Werner Vogels (Amazon) and Jason Hoffman (Joyent) as well as representatives from QQ (China) and GaduGadu (Poland). I learned a lot and met some great people.

I love the Naspers strategy to focus their internet business on ‘emerging markets’. It is refreshing to work with a business that has no interest in the US market, instead setting it’s sights on markets like China, Thailand and Brazil.

Their portfolio includes Tencent QQ (a gigantic Chinese service with, I am told, 50 million users coming online at the same time every evening) and mail.ru (Russia’s largest web site with over 30 million users).

This is my keynote on some lessons I learned at Kazaa. It was great fun to be amongst a crowd that are managing bigger communities than we ever served at Kazaa (we ‘only’ got up to 5 million concurrent users) and it felt incredibly retro to discuss tech that was so ‘old’.

Lessons from Kazaa: a retro talk from Pollenizer Studio on Vimeo. The next talk I give, I am going to try really, really hard to not say “ah” or “erm” :-)

Thank you to John Kotsaftis and Jacques Van Niekerk for embedding me in this process and thanks to MIH for allowing me to re-publish this video.