Customer Gone Viroooooooaaaaallll

When we launched on Product Hunt last month, one of the companies that signed up was a fantasy soccer startup named Togga. They were building an app called World Cup Challenge. It’s a fantasy game where you pick the winners of the matches and compete against your friends; like a March Madness pool.

Box Score

World Cup Challenge + Mave

May 18 — June 6

• ~100,000 installs (goal was 20–30K)
• 42% day-over-day invite growth
• 13 average invites per inviter
• 11 median invites per inviter
• 32,711 invites on top day

Play By Play

We started paying close attention to World Cup Challenge when its users sent 1,000 invites in a day, just a few days after releasing with Mave. We were pumped, but we saw that they had gotten some press with their launch and figured that those numbers might die back down when it was over (as often happens). It did drop a bit, but the users who sent invites were sending over 13 invites each!

Then came the week leading up to the first game. The first day people sent 3,000 invites. And then, BOOM, things started going crazy. Invites got up to over 30,000 invites the day of the first game.

Recap & Analysis

For a full two weeks leading up to the world cup, World Cup Challenge sustained day-over-day growth of invites sent of 42%, as shown on the following log y-axis chart. If that number doesn’t mean much to you, that means it doubled every 2 days. It’s impressive for a hot startup to be growing at that rate month-over-month or for a public company to grow that much year-over-year. Now this was number of invites sent and not users, but as long as their conversion rates stayed relatively flat it works out to the same thing.

Inside the Clubhouse

Mave’s drop-in invite page makes it easy for people who want to invite friends to invite a lot of friends. In other words, it optimizes invites per inviter. We do this by 1) suggesting friends to invite and 2) allowing users to select a bunch of friends and send out individual text messages and emails in one click.

As much as we optimize our invite interface, the number of invites someone sends depends on many other factors. One of the main factors is the invite incentive. While great products will always have evangelists, to really move the needle with invites an app typically needs some kind of incentive.

There are two main reasons users invite friends to apps:

1. The app gets better when their friends join, like a social network

2. They get something out of it, like monetary credit or points

Let’s take a look at how Togga chose to implement Mave.

As you can see, World Cup Challenge has both invite incentives: a) people want to play against their friends and b) if you refer 10 friends you get a cool t-shirt. Everyone loves free t-shirts!

We were thrilled to be able to be a part of this, and it was a great validation of how our invite page helps app users invite lots of friends.

Think your app has what it takes to “go viral”? See what Mave can do for your user growth by getting started here.