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Socialcam is a mobile video app that lets users make and share quick films.It launched 15 months ago and received 1 million downloads in itsfirst six months. Now Socialcam has about 8 million daily active users—morethan 8X the size of its closest competitor, Viddy , which raised a round of financing at a $300 million+ valuation. Between its website and its app, more than 75 million people useSocialcam. We spoke with Socialcam cofounder Michael Seibel. He told us how Socialcam has kept up its explosive growth and howit has utilized Facebook's Open Graph. Here are the key takeaways: Socialcam was able to scale to 75 million users by utilizing bothits website and its app. Unlike Instagram , where the site merely encourages app downloads, Socialcam has afully-functioning website where users can view videos people have made. The 75 million users are either people who usethe website, people who have downloaded the app, or both 12-15 percent of people who have downloaded the app (13 million)are using it every day. Socialcam's website is already one of the most trafficked videosites in the world. Alexa ranks Socialcam.com as the 139th site in the U.S. Facebook timeline and Open Graph integration have helped make Socialcamexplode. Whenever a user watches or creates a video on Socialcam, theactivity appears on their Facebook feeds. Socialcam has grown so quickly, it's had to scale from 15 serversto 150 servers in the past 45 days . Here's our lightly-edited Q&A with the cofounder of Socialcam,Michael Seibel: How did Socialcam come to be? MS: I was the CEO of Justin.tv and my cofounders were senior engineers there. We came up withthe idea at Justin.tv in the fall of 2010. We had an iPhone app that allowed people to stream live videos, and all of ourusers said the same thing: "We use your app to stream video clips,not live video." They said they tried using the YouTube and Facebook app to stream clips, but all of them failed. We thought, "Why are we working on live video for the phone when noone has solved the problem of video for the phone?" We got to work on Socialcam and launched in March2011. It got its first 1 million downloads in six months, so wedecided to spin it out of Justin.tv. How big is the Socialcam team? Four people — three cofounders and one community manager. Why did Socialcam go through Y Combinator when Justin.tv is already a well-known name? There were three reasons we did Y Combinator. The first is everyonewho goes through YC can't help but speed up. We wanted to make surewe instilled a startup pace at Socialcam. Now we push code as fast as humanly possible. We have 2-4 weekdevelopment cycles and even faster cycles on our website. The second thing was advice. YC sees soooo many companies andunderstands a lot of potential issues startups will confront. Wewanted access to the amazingly smart group of people. Last, I'd been through YC before with Justin.tv, but my cofoundershadn't. It was a perfect opportunity for them to get the YCexperience. For a while, you and your competitor Viddy were neck and neck interms of downloads and traffic. Now you've blown past them by8-fold. How are you keeping the momentum? MS: We're almost three times bigger than our next biggestcompetitor in terms of monthly traffic. In terms of daily, we're 8times bigger. There are three big factors in our continuous growth. The first,which is hard to ignore, is Facebook. Our integration with Facebookhas been ridiculously powerful. Users can share the videos they'reviewing on Socialcam, and that has been huge for us. The second thing is the fact that we allow people to take videoswithout any limits. We hear time and time again that people whohave tried other apps come to us because we have no time limits. Most people don't take videos. So when they're using one of theseapps, it's a new experience. We have a theory that most people whocreate mobile videos are documenters, not directors. If you're adocumenter you're taking a video of something in the real world youwant to capture. If you're a director, you're trying to createsomething in the real world. Imagine a birthday party. You're going to take a video wheneveryone sings happy birthday. You can't tell everyone, "Singreally fast because I have to get it in this video!" So Socialcamdoesn't have time limits. The third is scaling. Socialcam had to scale from 15 servers to 150servers in the past 45 days. If my cofounders, who are theengineers, weren't able to pull that off, it wouldn't matter howviral we were or how well we were serving our customers. Everythingwouldn't work. Being able to keep up with this level of growth wouldn't have beenpossible five years ago. I am an expert from magneticfloating.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Levitation Display , Floating Bottle Display Manufacturer, Magnetic Levitating Globe,and more.
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