Tickle

The best-friend quiz: 0 to 1 million members in 9 days

Shaan recounts how Michael Birch seeded a new social network with a 'how well do you know me?' quiz: you answer questions about yourself, send it to friends to guess your answers, they get a score, then they're prompted to make their own. It hit 1 million members in 9 days.

“So you would answer a bunch of questions about yourself, which is your favorite topic. Then you would send it to your friends and it would say, hey, this is a quiz to see how well you know me. They're kind of intrigued. How, you know, let me see what I get. They would try to answer what you, you know, what your guess, what your answers are. And they would get a score at the end of You know, here's your best friend score, you're a 76% or whatever it is. And then it would say, by the way, you should do this too. You take your quiz and send it back to them. 9 days, 1 million members.”

Steal thisBuild a quiz where the result is only valuable once you forward it to friends, who then must make their own.

Scraping Hotmail/Yahoo address books added 150,000 users a day for a year

Birch copied address-book importing (which his acquirer Tickle had built but couldn't make work) onto Birthday Alarm over a weekend. Signups jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 in 24 hours, peaking near 200,000/day and holding at 150,000/day for a full year.

“So I worked the weekend, put it live Sunday night, and then looked at the data like 24 hours later and we'd added 100,000 new members. So we were still adding 10,000 a day and then 24 hours later we just added 100,000 members.”