This story is completely mis-leading. They certainly had users before 15 days ago [1]. The product was developed in an incubator in the Winter 2009 class [2]. They have relaunched and revamped it, but to start from a clean slate and say you had zero users with no disclosure or information about your past makes this story blatantly false. It's a shame because it still would have been a good story without the reset.
The application is actually just revamped as I understand it (based on the above review by Startup North); maybe in a major way but still based on a previous product. As Ted from Kik has responded below, they e-mailed nearly all of their 55K previous users, though very very few of them converted.
Their history deserves mentioning and is likely what put them in a position to be able to launch, market and scale effectively. The users may not be the same, but the strategies and the tactics used to get there are likely based on previous experiences as well as having some great people get them this far.
Obviously this community isn't the target of their post, but I would be even more interested in hearing the whole story: how they went from zero to 55K customers in 7 months, lost almost all of them, and then scaled it back up to a million users in two weeks
Ted from Kik. Just wanted to jump in and answer a few questions:
On October 21, 2010 we launched a completely new service. The only thing that was the same between new Kik and old Kik was the name and the app store accounts. Users from the old system (about 55K active in the last week before the hard switch over) were notified that the new service was available and that the old one would soon be shut down. About 23K did get the upgrade, but almost all of them dropped it immediately due to losing all of their contacts from the old system, and the now lack of built in SMS texting. You can see this in the graphs - a brief peak, followed by a multi day flat line. I really apologize if this is misleading, it was not intentional.
The numbers. They are real. We can hardly believe it ourselves. The app is built to be incredibly viral (more on that later), but we never spam any of your contacts. All that happens is on registration, we do a quick one time, secure scan to let you know who on Kik you might know. That's it. Nothing is ever stored or shared, and nobody outside Kik will ever hear even a peep that you have joined Kik (unless, of course, you tell them, which a lot of people seem to be doing!) From there, people keep using it because they really like it. It is a bit hard to understand or explain (well, not as hard as Twitter I guess, but still) so it is probably best to just use the app for a bit. You will see why people like it.
We are moving as fast as possible to scale the servers, and add features. As noted below, we've been working on our vision for almost two years now, and this is just the first step. Expect some pretty cool things to come, and until then, thank you for letting us share in this incredible ride.
I have a quick suggestion for blog posts like this: don't assume that readers have any idea what it is you do. Take the opportunity in the first paragraph to describe what your product is and why people use it. That way, people coming to your post who aren't already users will be oriented immediately. They will, I suspect, also be more likely to use your product.
I concur. I spent 5 minutes reading through the site and I have zero idea what this Kik thing really is. If it's yet another closed service I'm expected to sign up for, no thanks.
landing on blog posts where the template/sidebar etc. give you no idea about the service or even link to signup/homepage is so annoying yet so easy to fix
I hate having to edit off the end of the URL and going to just the domain to find out what the product is about
It's definitely impressive, but the numbers are still not "real" as is portrayed, just because accounts weren't carried over that doesn't mean old users didn't re-sign up based on the old product.
Anyway not trying to criticise this is incredible either way, but it's definitely different to going from 0 to 1m users.
I'm just saying there is a difference. 55,000 people instantly aware of your new product who used your old product is a massive boost compared to 0 people knowing about your product when you release it. Anyway this is a fruitless discussion, it's impressive, just different!
Just a quick FYI - once one goes to the blog (either the blog link or the "more info" on the homepage) many of the bottom nav ("Other Clicks") links do not work because they are relative paths (they all map to blog URLs).
My girlfriend and I use Kik, for us it was a BBM alternative after I got an Android phone.
And we've been using it longer than 15 days, so to me the headline/graph is misleading. They just released a complete overhaul so they reached a million users on v2 of their software, but how many did v1 have?
We passed 600,000 users around midnight yesterday, after launching the product from a user base of 0 two weeks ago today.
From Thursday, 3 days ago. I looked around the blog, it seems they "went viral" around November 1st. I also found a claim they're getting 3 new registrations per second. Very strange, but also fantastic if it's real!
I don't have any of these devices it supports, but I get the impression the cross compatibility is what caused the popularity.
I also know Ted and he's not the type to make up numbers for attention. Keep in mind that they've been working on some variation of this for over a year, so while they took off virally very quickly, it's not an "overnight success", it's a "hard work finally pays off" one.
I dont think so, my facebook feed is currently assaulted by friends asking and sharing their KIK ID (and none of them is a geek or an early adopter usually)
Ok so I just read every article I could find about these guys online - could somebody explain why a user would install kik over standard text messaging or IM?
There must be something to it, I just don't know what.
If it wasn't for the buzz, it is a product website I would just brush past without a second glance
I'm not familiar with BBM , but it appears Kik works for Iphone, Android and Blackberry. The only significance I can see between using something like IM client, available on all these clients, is letting you know if message was read or not. Is there anything else, significant about BBM ?
But I'm concern about this service and privacy. It uses same tactic as Buzz (which tactic I didn't like).
Here is my understanding - please correct me if I'm wrong:
First, Kik ties in a person's username with their email address. Kik then sorts through the person's addressbook to find potential friends. This is kinda privacy issue because a user may not want someone that is in their addressbook to know they have a Kik account. But other people (my stock broker, tax consultant) will because if they have your email address then they also have your Kik username without authorization or adding that person to your friends list.
Is there a way to disable the above approach - maybe to ask which people will see you on Kik?
Firstly, this is awfully impressive. Kudos to the Kik team!
I'd love to know more here. Out of these 1,000,000 users, how many of these are actual activated users? After 15 days, what's the retention like? Where are all of these users coming from, and how does the origin of the user affect activation and retention?
One lesson that we've been learning the hard way is that it's one thing to acquire users, and it's another thing entirely to convert a new user into a long-term, engaged customer. I'd love to hear how Kik is approaching that, given their success in acquisition.
Not really that a great product is mandatory, but simple, easy to pronounce names when combined with simple and easy to use apps usually equals success. It's also important that the name can be attributed to the people using the app (Kiksters, Tweeters, Googler etc), and the actions can come from the name as well (Kiks, Tweets, Google it). Also leave room for apps using your api (if you have one) to take advantage of your name, (Twitpic, etc). Combining all that when picking a name really helps.
My startup was in the same incubator space as Kik up until 3 weeks ago (we just moved out,) and it's really amazing to see these guys finally take off. They have some amazing stuff in the pipeline that's going to blow everyone away.
Funny thing is, they are literally across the hall from Enflick, which is another IM startup that's wildly successful.
I'm in another startup that moved out of the AC a few months ago. We've never really been sure what Kik does or what they're up to, but they always seem to have a lot of people in there working round the clock. Nice to see the fruits of it—and good for them.
When I first heard of Kik, I thought it to be somewhat repetitive. There are tons of apps just like it. But, the viral nature of the app sold me. The fact that contacts are automatically added allow me to use the app immediately.
The next steps for Kik are crucial. People are going to have a problem with being so accessible to people they don't know. The ability to block users might arise conflict with "Why did you block me on Kik?" I'm interested to see how they handle these issues. On top of that, they're adding image support, which I think is a pretty hefty dent on their servers.
Again, congrats on the growth, but good luck with keeping your users! As of right now, it took me a whole minute to send a Kik message out. I'm sticking to Blackberry Messenger for now, which by the way is an amazing client minus lack of cross-mobile platform availability.
Those are actually real accounts backed by unique emails. We haven't expected such a viral growth ourselves but.. we don't complain :) Other than complete lack of sleep due to the scaling needs.
Hence my question: are there any brilliant server developers looking for a job with Kik? :)
You should really define "server developer", otherwise you'll end-up with offers ranging from "bash scripting" through "rails backend developers" to "C developers".
I am pretty sure all the apps I have on my phone require login only once and never again. I'd just avoid to login that one time in a crowded place and the risk is gone.
