1st hand experience with viral growth - iRead
On June 6th I had posted about iRead. We had just about launched the application then & we were at a few hundred users.
As of now iRead has 25k users!
So if I dont make much sense below, please bear with me - I am still in shock & euphoria :)
Its been an amazing week. When we started we had a competitor with a lead of about 5000 users growing quite rapidly. Below is a graph of how the 2 applications were adopted. The x axis is not time, but samples I was able to take of the data. ( so the steep lines are nights, when I could not sample the data)
The Books app was unfortunate to have server issues on a monday & thats when they lost most of the momentum.
Developing this facebook app has been a wonderful experience - high competition, pressure, thrill, viral growth, users shouting to get features - threatening to go away otherwise. Incredible stuff! Never in my last 5 years of professional career have I interacted this closely with my users - responding to their messages pacifying them, making them understand limitations & getting requirements & ideas for the next feature to build.
We have had a fair share of mishaps - with our production server going down & not getting rebooted for 5 hours! (yes we were running off a single server - and we had about 100 users then)
A Mysql crash, disk corruption, internet connection going off in the middle of setting up mysql replication...
Truly an exhilrating ride.
I cant thank facebook enough for providing this opportunity to application developers to try out their ideas .
I believe that facebook has now moved to a completely different league - myspace, orkut seem non-competitive & I have heard that both of these do not have great technology - so it'll take them a long time to imitate facebook.
More about facebook later. Here is a good analysis of facebook platform.
Right now, I am soaking in the fact that 25k users have adopted an app that I built with 1 great developer, in just a week's time.
The ride only gets better from now on.
As of now iRead has 25k users!
So if I dont make much sense below, please bear with me - I am still in shock & euphoria :)
Its been an amazing week. When we started we had a competitor with a lead of about 5000 users growing quite rapidly. Below is a graph of how the 2 applications were adopted. The x axis is not time, but samples I was able to take of the data. ( so the steep lines are nights, when I could not sample the data)
The Books app was unfortunate to have server issues on a monday & thats when they lost most of the momentum.
Developing this facebook app has been a wonderful experience - high competition, pressure, thrill, viral growth, users shouting to get features - threatening to go away otherwise. Incredible stuff! Never in my last 5 years of professional career have I interacted this closely with my users - responding to their messages pacifying them, making them understand limitations & getting requirements & ideas for the next feature to build.
We have had a fair share of mishaps - with our production server going down & not getting rebooted for 5 hours! (yes we were running off a single server - and we had about 100 users then)
A Mysql crash, disk corruption, internet connection going off in the middle of setting up mysql replication...
Truly an exhilrating ride.
I cant thank facebook enough for providing this opportunity to application developers to try out their ideas .
I believe that facebook has now moved to a completely different league - myspace, orkut seem non-competitive & I have heard that both of these do not have great technology - so it'll take them a long time to imitate facebook.
More about facebook later. Here is a good analysis of facebook platform.
Right now, I am soaking in the fact that 25k users have adopted an app that I built with 1 great developer, in just a week's time.
The ride only gets better from now on.