Story
Birthday Alarm: the address book that pivoted into a viral cash machine
Shaan tells how Michael Birch built a self-updating address book nobody wanted, then noticed the only loved feature was birthday reminders. He turned that into birthdayalarm.com and engineered a viral loop where each user recruited their whole contact list.
“He builds this product. It's really complicated. It's not really going anywhere. But he adds one feature to the address book, which is birthday. What's your birthday? And which is ironically the thing that doesn't change. You don't need a dynamic address book to do that. But he started sending a reminder.”
Steal thisWhen users only love one feature of your product, kill the rest and make that feature the whole product.
Number
Birthday Alarm: $4–5M/yr at 80% profit with almost nobody working on it
At its peak Birthday Alarm did $4–5M a year in revenue at roughly 80% profit, run by Michael Birch's wife, sister-in-law and cousin. It funded his next startup, Bebo, which he later sold for ~$850M while owning 70%+.
$5M
Annual revenue · USD/year
“And it was making at its peak $4 or $5 million a year of revenue with most of that being profit, like maybe 80% profit at that time.”
Story
Michael Birch invented viral marketing because he had no ad budget
Shaan recounts working with growth legend Michael Birch, who built one of the first address-book importers for Birthday Alarm because he couldn't afford marketing and had to use customers to get more customers.
“so he was working on viral marketing cuz he just didn't have a budget. So he's like, I gotta use my customers to get me more customers.”
Number
Birthday Alarm hit 50 million members with zero paid marketing
Shaan describes how Michael Birch's Birthday Alarm grew purely through a viral address-book-import loop, with a pre-filled message and one-click invites, reaching 50 million members on no paid spend.
$50M
Members acquired · members
“Birthday Alarm grew to 50 million members with zero paid marketing. 50 million.”
Idea
Birthday Alarm: a website whose only job is reminding you of birthdays
Birch's breakthrough was a dead-simple site that just reminds you of birthdays. Because almost nobody knows their friends' birthdays, the only way to use it is to email everyone asking them to enter their date, baking virality into the core action.
“now we were thinking viral, viral, viral, like, can we do a website? And all it does is just remind people of birthdays. Like, that's it. Super simple, simpler than LemonLink by far in many ways. And we knew it where we thought it could be inherently viral because the reality is if you think about whose birthday do you really know by heart, you know, you're like children's, your parents, siblings. You probably don't know your cousins. You may know one or two best friends, but that's it.”
Steal thisDesign the core use of your product so the only way to use it is to invite other people.
Story
The copy-paste tweak that took Birthday Alarm to 10,000 signups a day
Instead of sending invite emails from their own server (which got blocked), Birch's brother suggested a text-area box letting users copy a pre-written invite and send it from their own email client. Overnight signups jumped from a handful a day to hundreds, eventually 10,000 per day.
“And then we're like, why don't we just do a text area? I think it's my brother's idea actually. Why don't we just do this, uh, text area box thing and let them copy and use their own email client rather than us sending and getting blocked because our mail server's not listed.”
Steal thisRoute invites through users' own email clients so messages land in inboxes instead of spam folders.
Story
Scraping Hotmail/Yahoo address books added 150,000 users a day for a year
Birch copied address-book importing (which his acquirer Tickle had built but couldn't make work) onto Birthday Alarm over a weekend. Signups jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 in 24 hours, peaking near 200,000/day and holding at 150,000/day for a full year.
“So I worked the weekend, put it live Sunday night, and then looked at the data like 24 hours later and we'd added 100,000 new members. So we were still adding 10,000 a day and then 24 hours later we just added 100,000 members.”
Number
$13.95 greeting-card subscription took revenue from $10K/month to $10K/day
Birch added a $13.95 annual all-you-can-send greeting-card subscription to Birthday Alarm. The first day alone brought in $10,000, taking the business from $10K/month to $10K/day.
$13.95
Annual greeting-card subscription price · USD/year
“So we added a subscription, was $13.95 for an annual subscription, all you can send greeting cards. And, um, so we went live with that whilst I think we were still working at Tickle. And then this was, uh, everything's always a very round number in zeros for us for some reason, but the first day we made $10,000. So we went from $10,000 a month to $10,000 a day.”
Steal thisLayer a cheap recurring subscription on top of a free viral product to monetize without killing growth.
Number
Birthday Alarm made ~$4M its first year with just two employees
In the first 12 months of charging, the business cleared just under $4 million in revenue while expenses stayed flat: still just Birch and his wife in a tiny office with the same colocation costs.
$4M
First-year subscription revenue · USD/year
“Yeah. And so with that first year, we made just shy of $4 million, like the first 12 months of charging. And our expenses were the same. It was still myself and Sochi in this little office. Our colo costs were the same.”