summary
In only ten days, Coworkers Siqi Chen and Alex Le created Friends for Sale, a social game on Facebook that allows users to purchase friends with virtual currency. Six months later, the pair raised $4 million in venture capital funding while spending nothing on marketing. Friends for Sale now has 600k users and sees a staggering 10 million pageviews per day.
friends for sale’s success story
- On October 20, 2007, Siqi Chen and Alexander Le began coding Friends for Sale. They did so in their spare time, as they both worked full-time for Powerset, a semantic search company.
- Within 10 days, Siqi and Alex finished development of Friends for Sale and launched it on November 1, 2007.
- By December, Friends for Sale had gone from zero to 1 million pageviews per day; around this time, both Siqi and Alex quit their jobs at Powerset to work on Friends for Sale full-time.
- Siqi and Alex founded Serious Business in February 2008 to further develop social games, with Friends for Sale as its flagship application. Ryan Ferrier is hired as their COO.
- In April 2008, Serious Business raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew becoming a board member. Friends for Sale is now the 7th most used Facebook application in terms of daily users.
did you know…
- … Friends for Sale currently has 600,000 users? It sees 500,000 visits per day and 300 million pageviews per month.
- … Friends for Sale makes more than enough money to cover its expenses? Although not disclosed, they make their income (likely substantial at 10 million pageviews/day) from banner ads and sponsorships.
- … Siqi and Alex have spent $0 on marketing? Friends for Sale is a classic example of a viral application, one which is spread through word of mouth.
- … Siqi believes that successful Facebook applications have three core qualities? They should be social (viral), engaging (make money) and universal (have potential).
- … Friends for Sale was created by only two people? Founders Siqi and Alex developed the initial in only 10 days, with Siqi focusing on frontend and Alex handling application logic.
- … Friends for Sale runs on 20 Ruby on Rails servers? This consists of database, application, staging, and front end servers, all of which are hosted by SoftLayer.