Birthday Alarm's Email Growth

A story about how Michael Birch created viral growth for Birthday Alarm through email contact importing before viral marketing was a common practice.

"Michael Birch built one of the first address book importers for a company called Birthday Alarm. The way it worked was - I make a calendar and invite you to add your birthday to my calendar. This was before Facebook existed. When you'd add your birthday, it would say 'Don't you want to remember my birthday too?' and you'd say 'yeah sure.'

Then it would say 'You've got one birthday on the calendar but surely you've got more friends than one, so why don't you invite some other friends? Let me make it easy for you - would you like to import all your friends from Hotmail?'

He added one thing at a time to make it more viral. He added a prefilled message because people were stopping since they couldn't think of what to say. Birthday Alarm grew to 50 million members with zero paid marketing.

Michael told me at his house, 'I thought there's no way they let this go for more than 10 days.' He said 'It's now been 15 years and this thing still works.' He was working on viral marketing because he didn't have a budget, so he had to use his customers to get more customers."