This is a story about one calm January evening.
We just pushed an update to several vox.io subsystems and made a fairly big conceptual change in our beta invite system. The new invite system allowed every beta tester to spread the word about vox.io and post a referral URL to Twitter or Facebook in addition to the email invite system.
For each new beta tester that joined and completed the signup process (including the phone number verification via SMS), we awarded 0.15€ of bonus credit to the person that issued the invite. Before the change, access to vox.io’s beta was very limited - each user had a small number of invites that were only deliverable via email—meaning that the product was only accessible by our limited circle of friends.
Once the new invite system had been deployed, we ran a couple of functional tests (a super important move to make sure the product works), and tweeted about the update without mentioning the invite system specifically. At that time, vox.io was running with approximately 10 concurrent users on Chartbeat (which, by the way, is a brilliant tool).
Then something amazing happened.
After about 30 minutes, we saw traffic build up at an amazing pace with more or less a single referral URL. The source was HackerNews (a great online community/forum for hackers and nerds). Forty-five minutes after deploying the new invite system the magic began—we saw our user count jump from 10 to 160 within 5 minutes.
We did plan to follow this post’s guidelines and submit a “Rate our startup” post on HackerNews ourselves, but one of our users beat us to it and submitted his own referral URL to HackerNews along with his own tagline - Vox.io - Skype in the cloud. The guy saw a fair opportunity to increase his vox.io account balance, but he also saw a product worth promoting (as he told us later).
This was the first time our product experienced a serious user load and we’re proud to say that it survived the test brilliantly. Of course there were bugs, but we fixed them in real time and most users did not notice we were actually delivering new iterations of code while they were browsing around vox.io’s beta and making calls to their friends.
We ended the day with a fair number of signups - a record number of 187 concurrent users (according to Chartbeat) - and with two fairly big press stories for an unknown company from Slovenia - one on The Next Web and the other on FastCompany.
The moral of this story is that having a good product and a simple invite system can contribute enormously to acquiring new users. Nothing new, but worth remembering.
Join our beta, sign up for an invite on our landing page, and help us shape the future of telephony.
Continue the conversation on Twitter. Get in touch with @vox_io
