Almost anyone who uses the Internet is familiar with
Hotmail.com.  In fact, the Hotmail name is almost as widely
recognized as Yahoo.

What does Hotmail.com have to do with viral marketing, which is
one of the greatest marketing tactics today?

Hotmail is by the far the best online example of successfully
implementing viral marketing.  Hotmail has grown its subscriber
base more rapidly than any other company in history, online or
offline.

By giving away a free web based email account with a tag line at
the bottom of every outgoing email that read, "Get Your free,
private email at www.hotmail.com", their promotional machine is
constantly on auto-pilot.

Hotmail.com was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith way
back in 1996.  They were both worked for the same company and
were frustrated that the company email system did not allow them
to communicate privately.

They could not access their AOL email accounts from work and
therefore could not send email messages using that system.  That
is when the two of them hit upon the idea of creating web-based
email that would allow them to exchange emails securely.

They called their new creation Hotmail.

But since they both of them did not have the resources to launch
the service, they began shopping around their new idea to
venture capitalists under the disguise of a business plan for a
net-based personal database called JavaSoft.

They didn't really care about the database project and were
using the database project as a front for Hotmail.

The two decided to present their plans for the database program
to various venture capitalists to see who would reject it for
the right reasons.

At their presentation with venture capitalists Draper Fisher
Jurvetson, one of the partners by the name of Steve Jurvetson
was listing the same problems with the database idea every other
venture capitalist had pointed out. But he was rejecting the
database idea for the right reasons.

So, Bhatia and Smith introduced their Hotmail idea.

The venture capitalists realized the potential of the idea and
gave the necessary capital to Bhatia and Smith to launch the
Hotmail service.

... you know the rest.

Two years and 22 million subscribers later, the two sold
Hotmail.com to Microsoft for a mind-boggling $400 million
dollars making the two of them instant millionaires.

What made Hotmail take off at such an alarming rate?

... viral marketing.

There own email users were promoting the Hotmail service
every time they sent out an email message.

The keys to Hotmail's success were:

1. They were the first web-based email provider.

2. They had an innovative product and people would want to use.

3. The offered their service for free.

4. The service was being promoted by its users.

With these four items as their foundation for growth, Hotmail
grew exponentially within months.

Within six months of the first Hotmail account being registered
from India, there were over 100,000 Hotmail accounts registered
without a single penny of advertising spent in India.

Hotmail grew so rapidly that the service was too much for their
servers to handle and they had to continually upgrade their
hardware.

If you have a product or service that can meet Ralph Wilson's
"six" principles of viral marketing...

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm

... you could potentially be sitting on the next Hotmail success
story.