NSFW: Data Porn

It’s been busy here at Wavii — our first 3,000 users were let on to the site! We know a lot of you are still waiting for invitations, but don’t worry, the gates will be opening soon. In the meantime, we thought we’d share some fun numbers from last week.

To kick off our beta testing we wanted a small set of adventurous users to help find kinks in the system (thank you!). So we started by inviting 1,000 readers from TechCrunch and PandoDaily.

Inspired by our friends over at Everlane

But we also wanted an ongoing trickle of new users as well, so we created a way for more people to get in — each person who signs up at our home page is given a unique URL that they can share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter. As more of your friends use your link, the sooner you will be invited to Wavii.

Look at the Curves on Those!

There has been a lot of interest in how the invitation process went, so we started diving into the numbers… It turns out that building spreadsheets and trawling our databases is tedious and boring; we can do better than that.

I’m really excited to share with you a d3.js powered force-directed graph of our sign-ups!

Watch the HTML5 visualization:

Unfortunately that visualization is a little intense for some slower computers (hey, it’s my first d3 visualization – and it’s got a lot of room for improvement).

We’ve also made a YouTube version of the same thing:

Each bubble is a person that signed up on our site. People who arrived from TechCrunch are on the left in green, and people from PandoDaily are on the right in orange, and everyone else comes in from the bottom. Bubbles get larger and spawn smaller bubbles each time they refer someone, and then slowly die off as people stopped using their links.

• Kevin Rose’s tweet caused 1,119 sign-ups, about 45 of those within a minute. He also drew other influencers like Dave Powell, who referred nearly 400 himself.
• Marissa Mayer’s tweet caused 473 sign-ups, garnered influencers like Ricardo Galli and Adam Nash, and triggered an article.
• PandoDaily caused 813 – taking 39 minutes to get to 100 – and TechCrunch caused 731, taking 44 minutes for their first hundred.
• My favorite tidbit is the tweet by Guns N’ Roses. Apparently, every few weeks they tweet their followers in an effort to cause some havoc on the web and take down websites – we were their latest target. Thankfully, our servers held strong and they didn’t succeed 😛

The Raw Numbers

• So far, over 30,000 people have signed up.
• Of those sign-ups, 14% managed to convince at least one other person to sign up on their behalf. Because of this, they got to see a sneek peek of the site.
• Another 3% managed to get 5+ friends to sign up and are comfortably in the priority queue for our next major wave of Wavii invites.
• 2% convinced 10+ friends to sign up, giving them an immediate invite to the site.
• Finally, and much to our CEO Adrian’s chagrin, 1% will be getting snazzy new T-Shirts by referring 20+ friends.

Oh, There’ll be More

We hope you found this interesting; and we welcome any questions you might have. Also, if you feel like mucking about with the raw data for the visualization, feel free!

We are working hard to iterate upon our user feedback – and we will be getting the rest of our invites out as soon as possible.

-Ian