Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

The Social Network movie, wild growth and Yovia

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

You may have heard about the recent movie highlighting the growth of Facebook. “The Social Network” has scored well at the box office, and it’s a perfect example of a runaway web success story.

It’s the story most Internet entrepreneurs dream about. Organic, wild out-of-control growth…The kind of situation where developers scramble to keep up with a flood of new users, venture capitalists throw money at you and everyone gets rich.

The Social Network Effect

Yovia reach - beta users - 6,000 users plus their personal networks of friends means a ton of traffic!

The past 4 years at Yovia hasn’t been quite that dramatic, but in the last 6 months, we’ve doubled in size, and the growth has been almost entirely organic. Let’s be clear: We’re still tiny.

This is the thing: we’ve not even launched officially yet. In fact, for the past 2 months, we’ve actually tried to limit the growth, yet it keeps on growing. As it turns out – our methodology (Social Velocity) actually works.

Yovia’s growth is a perfect example of the law of networks in action. As Yovia grows faster – it grows faster. Today we hit 6,000 beta users, which again, is a tiny number in the scheme of things.  (Facebook has 526 million users!).

Still, these 6,000 users created 60,000 conversations with almost 3 million of their friends on Facebook. They also managed to completely bring our servers down and over the last 30 days a crack team of experts has been rapidly moving us to a cloud environment, streamlining the code and preparing us for 10 or 20 times the amount of people. It’s sort of like the Facebook movie, except with less backstabbing, way less money flowing in and a lot less hype.

We’re excited, a bit tired, and literally hours away from being able to officially launch this. Ready the servers, warm up the coffee and buckle your seatbelts everyone!