I woke up this morning to a tip that we have another Boston built viral site on our hands. The site, threewords.me, launched just a few days ago and went viral last night — realizing over 125,000 pageviews [UPDATE: Bao just tweeted that he has gotten over 220,000 pageviews in 2 hours!]
The idea is simple: create a splash page, and share the link with other people asking them to describe you in three words, or to “three words me.” One of the most fun parts is the ability to anonymously describe people. Check out all the reactions it’s receiving from all across the world on Twitter with the hashtag #threewordsme. In fact, it’s trending right now on Tumblr.
Three Words is the creation of 18 year old Bentley University student, Mark Bao, who has also applied for the twenty under twenty Thiel Fellowship. Bao has been featured on lists like Mashable’s “10 Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter” and TechCrunch’s “10 Teen Entrepreneurs to Watch,” but he makes clear that he wants to be known as an entrepreneur with great ideas and building great products first and teenager second. Bao simply posted the link to his ThreeWords.me page on Facebook three days ago to promote it.
You can check out my page here: threewords.me/cheryl, and the wild stats to the right from 10 hours ago.
What’s amazing is that it has so few viral hooks — i.e., no easy Tweet, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. buttons to easily blast your Three Words page out to (not that copying and pasting a URL is hard, but is a few less steps). But Bao says he capitalized on what’s known as the “double viral loop.” In this case, after you three words someone you are immediately prompted to sign up yourself (which almost everyone does). The site also has incredibly low barriers to entry, which allows the masses beyond the tech crowd to easily jump in and use it.
According to Bao’s Twitter handle, he enjoyed 300 percent growth Tuesday, and 1600 percent day-over-day growth yesterday. In fact, all the traffic actually seems to have crashed the site for a short period of time. We reached out to Bao to learn more, but he’s catching up on some much needed Zzzs! You can learn more about him and his other companies right on his website.
What do you think about threewords.me? Let us know in the comments! Want to ThreeWords Bostinno? Do so here!
