How an oddball internet quiz turned a startup into an overnight success
And it's been a runaway hit.
The startup was already on the radar because of the company's CEO co-founder, Shaul Olmert. He's the son of disgraced former Israeli Prime Minister Eh ud Olmert. (Olmert is heading to jail, convicted on bribery charges, the first Israeli premier to be sentenced to time behind bars.)
Despite that notoriety (or ma bye because of it), PlayBuzz has not only thrived but has grown shockingly fast, to the delight of its CTO co-founder Tom Pachys.
This growth is because a few weeks after PlayBuzz launched, someone created a quiz using its platform that went viral on Facebook. This caused people to flock to PlayBuzz and start creating and sharing their own quizzes.
That post, called "Who Were You In Your Past Life?" was read by 17.5 million people and shared 5.8 million times.
"I still remember the date. February 24, 2014," co-founder Tom Pachys told us. Until then, the quizzes people created had gotten a "few hundred users daily," he recalls. This one hit 100,000 in an instant.
That also meant that the site went down, repeatedly, buckling under the traffic. Pachys and his small team spent the next two weeks at the office, coming up with creative emergency fixes as they experienced phenomenal traffic spikes that even their wildest predictions hadn't prepared them for.
In numbers: PlayBuzz went from:
- 3,000 users in December 2013 to
- 13,000 users in January, 2014 to
- 3 million in February to
- 12 million in March
- ... and today counts 94 million people as users.
In fact, it was in high school that he met Olmert, more than a decade older than him. Olmert was doing a short stint as a high-school computer programming teacher and Pachys was one of his students. Shortly after that, Olmert moved to New York and got work in the media industry, working for Oberon Media and then for Nickelodeon.
Olmert never forgot his coding wunderkind and even lined up a month-long internship for Pachys at age 15, across the ocean from Israel in New York, Pachys told us. (His mom reluctantly letting him to the US for the job.)
So when Olmert decided to launch a company to help publishers mimic Buzzfeed's success, he called Pachys to join him. Pachys in turn, called his army buddy Yaron Buznach, and the three founders got to work.
No revenue? No problem!
Today, PlayBuzz has raised about about $21 million in venture funds (a decent amount by Israeli standards), has 80
True, it has no revenue although that doesn't worry Pachys much yet. He says the company has no plans to charge for PlayBuzz. It does plan to run ads with a revenue-sharing model.
So what is the secret to PlayBuzz's viral success? Trying stuff and collecting data, Pachys tells us.
"I'm obsessed with analytics. I have a personal fetish for data. It tells you how to build good products," he tells us.
Here is the quiz that turned PlayBuzz into a viral sensation: