It started in 2007. I was an engineering intern at Amazon my freshman summer and I hated my life.
I was 18 in Seattle without a fake-ID. All my friends were in California. I sucked at my job. But, this coincided with the launch of the Facebook Platform.
Since I had nothing to do after work, I started by building out simple applications that I thought were useful. Turns out, no one cared about useful.
After getting sick of building useful applications, I launched my first ever personality quiz - How Good a Lover Are You? All of a sudden people cared. To the tune of 300,000 people in a matter of weeks.
I was hooked. I spent the next 3 years building Facebook applications and built every kind of shitty, viral app under the sun including:
- An assembly line of Cosmo-style personality quizzes from How Promiscuous Are You to What Color is Your Aura?
- The first ever friend quiz applications where you get notifications like "Your friend answered 'Is Ankur cute?' - click here to see what she said"
- An application creator that spawned over 10,000 gifting applications including the esteemed Send Your Friends a Flaming Bag of Poop
Since I operated largely as an independent entity, I had no concerns other than growth. What can I do to get the most number of people in the shortest amount of time?
And it worked. I reached over 200 million people. You have almost certainly used at least one of my applications.
In this course, I share seven of my favorite hacks that I employed over the course of those three years. They aren't necessarily the most effective strategies.. mostly, just my favorites.
