so my cofounder and i, moved our company mig33 from australia to silicon valley, and then to singapore to be closer to our markets. it’s a venture-backed massive mobile social entertainment company with over 50m registered users, a fast paced chat-centric social system filled with lots of fun things to do and with a unique monetisation model. and i thought the journey is an interesting one and something that i’d share.
mig33 is a lot of fun.
Over 7m users across hundreds of countries, 160,000 chatrooms, 30m messages a day (almost all in our own platform), dozens of community bulletin boards (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mig33+phpbb) is a pretty cool thing. On the world’s biggest website for mobile content, more people search form mig33 than games, sex and msn (http://www.getjar.net/site/topsearch).
Getting here hasn’t been easy. We’re not a standard internet company. We’re focussed on finding success in a new world. The shift in computing power from the desktop to the mobile, the rise of the application environment on the phone, and the decline of walled gardens (giving rise to greater customer choice) has given us the opportunity to build something truly unique. This also isn’t a typical internet company funded by the promise of online advertising revenues. We’re very realistic about what it’s going to take build out the services to support tens of millions of users.
To that end, we sort to find the right shareholders who could help us make mig33 everything it can be.
After a year of proving the basic business up (building a community, demonstrate monetisation potential, etc) and with the active involvement of some of our shareholders, we were able to secure some top Venture Capital firms – Accel , Redpoint and TVP.
Working with them, we’ve moved the company from Australia to Silicon Valley, built out a customer service and operations centre in Malaysia, and a development centre in Nanjing, China. We’ve been built up the Team with people like Francis Yu and others.
The last few months have been pretty hot. 2008 is only going to get better.
