Giphy's Viral Launch

A story about how Giphy unexpectedly went viral from just sharing with a few friends.

"I actually never meant it to go public. I sent it to 4 friends just as a fun thing for us to find GIFs - it would be our secret weapon to find GIFs on the internet when no one else could. Then someone sent it to a friend, and they sent it to a friend, and then it got on the cover of Gizmodo, and then it got cover of everywhere.

People were yelling at me because they were telling me it sucked, and I was like 'I wrote this in not that long - the search engine was like 3 lines of code.' In the first month, I was just working on it full time trying to get it not to crash. We got offers of funding, and then I brought on all my unemployed friends to come work on it.

The first few months it was just us hanging out trying to figure out what this thing was. We would go to the Standard and have oysters and rosé. Six months into it, we were like 'okay if we're going to devote the next year of our lives to this, let's commit to it.' That's when we put the 10x goal on the board and got serious. You can see in our Google analytics - we had a big peak, then hit the trough of despair where all traffic goes away for 3-4 months, until we got serious. Then the traffic started going up and it's been going that way since those first 6 months when we stopped eating oysters."