rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Indonesians are loving Toronto start-up’s app MavenSay" (Reply)

Toronto Star technology journalist Radu Mudhar notes the surprising success of Toronto-made app MavenSay in Indonesia, aided by social networks in that country (specifically, prominent Instagram users based in Jakarta).

“Here we are just a group of guys sitting at a startup in Toronto and we woke up one morning realizing that we had this massive spike in Asia,” said Bryan Friedman, one of three of MavenSay’s founders. “We rose to become the No. 1 free iPhone app across all categories in Indonesia. And we sort of sat at the top of the charts for five days, beating out Angry Birds, the Iron Man app, Facebook, Twitter, everyone.”

Friedman, who started the company with his former University of Toronto classmates Mike Wagman and Jesse Dallal, said they were floored when they saw the 15,000 downloads that first day, which continued the following week as well.

MavenSay, built by a seven-person team, had initially focused garnering its users from cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Celebrities, including Samantha and Charlotte Ronson, are sharing their likes. Maple Leaf Joffrey Lupul has recommended the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse, among other things.

Things were going well, said Friedman, but nothing could have prepared them for breakout success half way around the world. Looking back at the data, he chalks it up to some early adopters in Jakarta who had massive Instagram followings. Indonesia is home to an extremely tech savvy culture with high usage of social media platforms. At the end of 2012, Jakarta was the city with the most posted tweets in the world, and was the No. 5 country in the world for Twitter usage.

“We’ve tried to retrace the steps and find the exact person or group of people who started it,” he said. “The night this all started happening we noticed that a couple of these big Instagram users, who had about 16,000 followers each, and one of things you can do is publish your MavenSay profile on Instagram. So they cross-posted their profiles and it just went from there.”