jankoum

yes we are having an outage. we are working on it.

1. yes, i believe so - of course it was eight years ago.. i think if you submitted new version of the app and changed the name, it would show up under "new" category

2. yes, word of mouth only... but we helped people spread the word by putting "Tell A Friend" functionality into the app :)

3. it helped us pay for office space, salaries and server bills without eating much into VC or angel money we had in our bank account.

there were a few and i probably won't be able to list all of them, but here are some:

- build for multiple platforms. most of our competitors did iOS and Android only and called it a day.

- keep the app simple. most of our competitors complicated not only the sign up flow but also the in-app experience

- look native. our thinking was that hundreds of millions of people use native apps thousands times a day and if we use native look and feel in our app, it will feel comfortable and intuitive for our users.

- focus on speed, performance and reliability. it is easy to build an app that sends images quickly on 4G but you also have to work efficiently in the EDGE environments.

- localization. we translated into as many languages as we could as quickly as we could.

- support. for the longest time Brian and myself were the only two guys answering customer support emails.

- focus on organic growth as it makes your network stronger

there are probably a bunch of other things we focused early on that escape me at the moment...

i have no idea what is reddit-AMA style proof is... sorry i didn't get around to making HN account before today.

heh Flyertalk... awesome forum btw.

until we added messaging nothing I did worked. once we added messaging it took off on its own.

yes of course - because having a random 8 digit hex pin was so user friendly, easy and intuitive :)