You need to spread the idea and recruit others to help you take on Goliath. It’s a devilishly simple contagious idea. Apple did this brilliantly from the start. Steve Jobs warned against the abuses of IBM in the early days, and of Microsoft, more recently.

By blending these two seemingly discrete interests, I had created what I call “combined relevance.” When someone who was into both of those things, or knew someone who was, saw my absinthe spoon gadget, he knew it was right up his alley and he had to have one. And he had to tell all of his likeminded friends about it.

A little basic math will show us that seeding our idea to a small number of people and expecting it to take over the world is not realistic. If we have an idea with an R0 of 0.1—which is higher than any idea I’ve ever studied—and we seed it to ten people, those ten will infect only a single new person, and in the next generation the outbreak will d

Because of the Web and social media, everyone now has the power to type out his ideas and spread them to millions of people. Memory isn’t a big problem anymore.

What they’re interested in is the author’s unique point of view, the perspective that only that specific person could have. Talk as yourself, not about yourself.

the AIDA concept. It represents the steps in a purchasing decision: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. The attention of the customer must be attracted, interest must be raised, desire must be established, and finally, the act of purchasing must be completed.

An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.

His point was that ideas evolve like genes do, and their success is based on their ability to spread, not on the benefit they provide to their hosts.

The person must be exposed to your content. This means that the person has to be following you on Twitter, be a fan of your page on Facebook, subscribe to your email list, and so on. The person must become aware of your specific piece of content (the idea you want to spread). He has to read your tweet or open your email message. The person must be