Draw Something Is a Hit for OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter - Peter...

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After Five Years, Draw Something Is an Overnight Hit for OMGPOP. Now What?
FEBRUARY 29, 2012 AT 5:00 AM PT
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(http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/02/drawsomething.png)OMGPOP is a gaming company that has been plugging away at it for some five years, backed by $16 million in venture funding. (http://allthingsd.com/20110106 /omgpop-wins-a-10-million-round-for-social-gamesfrom-rho-softbank/) Its had okay but not overwhelming results. Until this month, when it released Draw Something (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draw-somethingfree/id488628250?mt=8). The game is essentially a mobile version of Pictionary and, for whatever reason, its a huge hit. Maybe it touches on some of the same things that Words With Friends mines, except it doesnt require spelling. In any case, its currently atop both the free and paid charts at the iTunes App store. And because its the kind of game that gets better as more people play it, its probably going to stay there for a while. CEO Dan Porter says Draw Something, which didnt exist a month ago, is now averaging two million active users a day. So how does a start-up ride that kind of rocket growth? Bigger question: Now what? I asked Porter to jot down some thoughts about what hes learned over the last few weeks, and what he thinks happens next. This is an edited version of his email replies: (http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/02 /dan-porter.jpg)All Hands On Deck
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Two weeks ago there were five people working on the game. Now there are 40 people. We redeployed resources from a ton of other projects, and with the growth even those people are maxed out. If we were a 10-person company now instead of a 40-person company we would be dead. It causes disruptions when people are quickly moved from one thing to another, but everyone likes being associated with a winner. Self-Reliance We started out heavily reliant on Facebook and Amazon S3. We started making too many calls to S3, and almost took down one of their data centers. They throttled us and it took us a while to figure out what was going on; for a while our numbers cratered as users could not connect. We had to move completely off of Amazon and host everything ourselves. As soon as we did that, our growth exploded again. Going from the 25th to the 1st most popular app was as much about performance as anything. We also use Facebook to log people in. When Facebook is slow our app is slow, except that users dont blame Facebook. They blame us. A Tale of Two App Stores The hardest thing about navigating the iTunes App Store is that there is a process for submission and approval. I understand why its how Apple keeps things nice. But when you find a problem in the game, you fix it in a day or two but then have to wait a week to get approved. It is stressful. And very different than operating on the Web, where you can push live multiple times a day. Android accounts for about 15 percent of our installs. The pro is we can push changes to the game live immediately. The challenge is that with their algorithm and so many different app stores, we are low in the charts. Its hard to believe the game could be blowing up as big as it is and be somewhat invisible on Android, but thats how it is. Meanwhile, no single Android device makes up more than 3 percent of the downloads. In other words, we are on more than 50 devices, and not one of them is larger than 3 percent. That is really difficult to support. (http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/02 /draw-something-2.png)Hot Ticket With the success of the app, investors, celebrities and brands have all come out of the woodwork looking to get involved. The first inclination is to say yes to everyone, especially when you havent had that type of attention. But you have to protect the brand and make very strategic choices. Attack of the Clones You always feel like as soon as you are successful other folks are going to come after you. Cloning is inherent in the games business. So you need to think long and hard about how to maintain your advantage against well-funded, well-run companies. Draw Something is about building the network for the game. When all your friends are in the game, as Zynga has

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proved with Words With Friends, then the network is the value of the game. Now we have more than two million players using the game daily. Thats a powerful network. Great offense, and great defense too. Thanks, Norway! You Too, Instagram. Were huge in Sweden and Norway. Weve been #1 there from day one and I have no idea why. And the activity on Instagram, as people share their drawings, has been tremendous. Spreading the game on Instagram would never have been on my radar in a million years.
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Steven Melton (http://disqus.com/google-25c526b64b41e3cc8bf7865938822342/) Great article, I have been playing this for about a week and loving it. Got a ton of my friends playing as well. Your title is VERY misleading though,

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"After Five Years, Draw Something Is an Overnight Hit for OMGPOP. Now What?" Am I the only one here who thinks that Draw Something has been out for 5 years by reading that? I mean come on...

ariellephan (http://disqus.com/ariellephan/) It's hard not to get that Draw Something is a new hit. The author wrote the title correctly. This is the one you have in your mind: After ve years of operation, Draw Something is an overnight hit etc.

stuart ough (http://disqus.com/google-e8fb40549c7dbd348b6e53a304ee5d94/) I agree with Steven. As written it implies irony that an "overnight success" is actually 5yrs old. A better title would have been "After 5 Years, OMGPOP Scores Overnight Success with Draw Something. Now What?"

David Hua (http://disqus.com/google-29087802be202fce8209eccc60cce712/) Great game and well executed!

Ro Gupta (http://rocrastination.com/) (http://disqus.com/Ro/) Nice write-up and congrats, .

Btw, Disqus is also big in Norway and Sweden and we're not really sure why either.

milrtime83 (http://disqus.com/milrtime83/) " Its hard to believe the game could be blowing up as big as it is and be somewhat invisible on Android, but thats how it is." Never played the game, but all the bad reviews complaining about several bugs could be the reason.

Dr No (http://pulse.yahoo.com/_47XHGLZVO6IUYLMWVUYFVN5LQU) (http://disqus.com/yahoo-47XHGLZVO6IUYLMWVUYFVN5LQU/) You can thank Android OS fragmentation for that.

Veronica Lopez (http://disqus.com/google-8a38a09bc660540fc88ff2d26b77535a/) I found out about the game through instagram and I told my sister and coworkers and we all got into playing it and it will spread from there ...Good work ...Hope Itunes approves xes fast Love the game and want to see it get only better.

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