Jeff Bezos, who went on top of the wealthiest people list a couple of weeks ago with ~98 billion dollars, said in 1997:
‘In late 20th century the scarcest commodity is attention. One way to get into the sight is do smth really innovative that brings actual value to customer. As a corollary newspapers will write about what you’re doing, customers will tell another customers, you’ll get a huge word-of-mouth fanout‘.
So, one of the ways for your project to go viral (when each new customer brings in at least another one) has two aspects:
- it should be innovative and, thus, can be interesting enough to get coverage of mass media
- it should bring real value to customer (maybe even exceeding expectations) to ‘conceive’ spreading word-of-mouth recommendations
But keep in mind that virality does not last long. To increase customer lifetime value, you also should think about retaining newcomers for subsequent purchases.