Tinychat Hits 20 Million Users

Sites include tinychat.com . Published on May 5th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Video chat service Tinychat is finally making strides and is now looking like a credible player in the online video chat space. The service which was launched in 2009 struggled for several years to gain traction but of late has been showing stunning form. The platform which had about 1 million users last year has jumped to over 20 million users.

According to Tinychat’s  co-founder Dan Blake, the site is now seeing massive daily use and now enjoys over 400,000 user each day. That’s just a bit of the good news; Tinychat is adding over 50,000 users each day and the amount of time spent on the site per user is now at 22 minutes.

The big question I suppose, is what happened; how does a service that stagnates at around 1 million users go to having 20 million users so quickly? The answer looks to lie in the form of investor capital. Tinychat was largely a bootstrap company at the outset but managed to raise $1.5 million from celebrity investors Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs. They were joined by Naval Ravikant.

The fresh infusion of capital seems to have been the difference. The word is now out and Tinychat is growing and even making money. The company uses the ‘freemium’ model which lets users sign up for free, and then they are charged further down the line. With big-name competitors in the space like Google Hangout, it will be interesting to see how Tinychat holds up in the coming years.