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Comment by ivankirigin | Hacker News Reader

Actually what most apps do without YesGraph is try to get users to send-all to every contact. Ugh. We want to fight that.

No one wants spam. It is a bad experience and has horrible conversion rates. No one wins. I literally pushed for removing send-all while running growth at Dropbox. We saw an 80% decrease in emails sent and only a 3% decrease in signups.

We want to make apps smarter using the data users have already shared with them. It's a better user experience that drives deeper engagement. Everyone wins.

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I've heard that idea a few times: that word of mouth will find a way. It is generally true that great products spread, so I don't fundamentally disagree.

But for everyone that has ever worked on building a product that didn't get traction (and I presume MANY people on HN fall into that camp), they need to know this isn't the whole story. You can drive far more performance by making sharing easier. Before you had to put a lot of engineering work into it, which is what YesGraph wants to solve. We'll do the heavy lifting for you.

This is all from experience at companies at Facebook and Dropbox. I've seen the inside and know how it actually works.

Love it. Early stage, hard to justify optimizing send-all into 'suggest 5 people to invite'.

Total no-brainer to use a drop-in like this. Make onboarding a way better experience, captures exactly the same, if not more, value on referrals.

Check out this post on viral metrics: http://blog.yesgraph.com/top-3-metrics/

In short, look at # sending, # invites, and % accept. We know we can do a lot better than the status quo.

Invite all: very small # sending, large # invites, very small % accept. By the way, getting marked as spam hurts all your invites, lowering your overall acceptance rates even for direct invites that weren't spamming the whole list.

YesGraph: larger # sending, more # invites, larger % accept.

This by the way is how to tell the difference between buzzword bullshit "viral" and real products: Math.

I love that last line.

I can understand how YesGraph gets a larger % accept, and probably larger # sending because you are so much better than the terrible "solutions" built into most apps, but I don't see how larger # invites directly follow from what you have. Isn't the point fewer, better invites?

When comparing to reply all it will be fewer. Most people sending invites send one or two. Making that two or three, on average, is huge.

It's hard to generalize about performance like this because apps are so different. Even within Dropbox for example, there are multiple invite channels, and their performance stats aren't similar.

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