What’s Going Down In Discord Town
Our blog has moved to our main website! Check us out on discord.com/blog to stay in the loop about future posts.
Last year we set out on a journey to modernize communication apps for gamers. We were frustrated with how difficult it was to get our friends into a VOIP group for a raid or a game of League and started wondering… why? We quickly realized there wasn’t a good answer. We wanted a VOIP app that was modern, easy to use, and heartfelt. A passion driven communication platform. So, we began building Discord.
Early on, we shared Discord with friends in the Final Fantasy XIV community. It started spreading slowly, guild to guild. One day in May a Discord user named Chrees (hey!) posted about our app in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit. Lots of people were curious and gave us a look: 600 that day to be exact. We were freakin’ blown away. We had a team lunch and celebrated and danced around in circles. That was an elating experience and as a team we often look back at that day as a marker from where we’ve come.
Fast forward to today and over three million people have tried Discord. One million people are joining up every single month now. That’s about 34,000 people every single day (or about 1.9 Staples Centers a day). I literally do not believe this is happening, but our team happily reminds me all the time. It’s unreal.
We could not have made it here without your incredible support. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken it upon themselves to spread the Discord word. We’ve seen support from streamers including the infamous Lirik and summit1g. We’ve seen support from game devs like Cloud Imperium Games. We’ve seen support from dozens of reddit communities. We don’t even have an official API yet but there are an enormous amount of bots built in so many different languages by the community. Things like dice bots, auto-moderation bots, and music channels. Mind boggling.
Best of all are the tweets. I love your tweets. I love all the messages we receive directly from you sharing your experiences and ideas about how to improve Discord.
As a result of how fast Discord is spreading we’ve closed an investment of almost twenty million dollars from investors with experience building great companies like Riot, Snapchat, and Twitter. This gives us enormous resources to keep doing what we’re doing (which is a requested feature by the way https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10327557-keep-doing-what-you-re-doing).
The speed at which we’ve been able to innovate is a testament to our awesome team. Some of us have worked together for years, but most of us are new friends. What brought us together is a passion for gaming and how it’s shaped each of our lives. It’s the magical fuzzy thing that drives everyone on this team to really give a shit. And working with a team of people who genuinely care is a recipe for making amazing stuff.
We have an incredible suite of features planned to launch over the coming months, which we’ll be sharing on twitter @discordapp along with other shenanigans. If you’re at PAX South this weekend come by our lounge and say hello (also schwag!).
Thank you so much for giving us a chance to make playing games a little bit better. #dontbeabroom
Jason
Founder & CEO
Discord
P.S. If you want to read more about the business angle, check out this blog from Greylock’s Josh Elman: https://medium.com/greylock-perspectives/our-investment-in-discord-60a2fe88ceca
