Bebo's Best Friend Test
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A story about how Michael Birch's social network Bebo achieved massive growth through a simple personality quiz feature.
"When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for this guy Michael Birch. He had built a social network called Bebo that he sold for $850 million. But before Bebo, he built a social network called Ringo that was the same exact thing, just 12 months earlier, that he sold for $2-3 million.
The only difference between Ringo and Bebo was that when he launched Bebo, instead of filling out a profile, you started with a personality quiz called the 'best friend test'. You would answer questions about yourself, then send it to your friends to see how well they know you. After they filled yours out, they would fill their own out and send it back to you. You would compete to see who knows each other the best.
This one mechanism made it go super viral. Bebo grew to a million users in just 9 days."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.