Viddy Hit #1 and 50 Million Users. Then Everything Slipped Away.

I joined an almost-empty Venice startup at roughly 15,000 downloads. We became the number-one app, attracted celebrity investors and watched more than a million people join in a day. Facebook changed the rules, we missed possible exits, and the company unraveled almost as quickly as it had grown.

Before TikTok, Instagram Reels and Vine, there was a race to invent mobile social video.

Viddy was one of the companies at the center of it.

I joined when the app had roughly 15,000 downloads. The office in Venice was almost completely empty. Within a year, Viddy was the number-one free app in Apple’s App Store. Celebrities and global brands were joining. Investors were flying private jets into Santa Monica, and our user count was climbing by hundreds of thousands of people a day.

Eventually, Viddy would claim 50 million registered users.

Then everything became slippery.

Facebook distribution disappeared. Acquisition opportunities did not become completed acquisitions. User growth fell. Leadership changed. Most of the team was laid off.

The equity that had once looked as though it might make me a millionaire ended up worthless.

The Team Before the Frenzy

Viddy was founded by JJ Aguhob and Brett O’Brien.

JJ led product. Brett was the CEO and an early investor. Chris led business development. Ken was the CTO. Jin led mobile development. David, a friend of JJ’s from UCLA Business School, ran operations.

They had the beginnings of a product and a founding team.

What they did not have was a social marketing machine.

My friend Jeffrey called me and told me about the company. My name had apparently surfaced several times as the founders asked their networks who could help launch and market a consumer technology product.

I have Jeffrey to thank for putting this entire chapter in motion.

Chris called me next.

He told me about himself, the team and the job ahead. Then he invited me to meet everyone at the company’s office in Venice.

At the time, I was living in Hollywood Beach in Oxnard, California. The night before the meeting, I walked onto the sand near my house, opened Viddy and made a video.

I wanted to arrive already using the product.

“Yeah, I Like You. You Should Come Work Here.”

The Venice office had enough space for the team Viddy hoped to become, perhaps 30 people, but almost none of that team existed yet.

There were barely any chairs.

JJ, Chris and I mostly hung out and talked. We discussed the product, the market and what Viddy could become.

Then JJ said something like, “Yeah, I like you. You should come work here. Meet Brett.”

That was essentially the interview.

I met Brett and started as a contractor through Evan White PR, Inc. In today’s language, I was an early fractional CMO before “fractional CMO” had become a common job title.

I worked on positioning, public relations, marketing, community, brand partnerships, celebrity relationships and the larger story surrounding the company.

About six weeks later, Brett told me he wanted me to join full time.

He offered me a salary, equity and a moving bonus to help relocate me from Oxnard to Los Angeles.

At Viddy’s peak, that equity looked as though it could be worth millions of dollars.

Ultimately, it was worth nothing.

But first, everything took off.

We Were Racing to Invent TikTok Before TikTok

Viddy allowed people to shoot, edit and share short videos from their phones.

The videos were limited to 15 seconds. Users could apply visual filters, add music and share their creations through Viddy and other social platforms.

The press frequently called it the “Instagram for video.” Other people described it as Twitter, except with video.

In 2011, I appeared on Extra with Mario Lopez, Renee Bargh and Terrell Owens to introduce Viddy to a television audience.

The segment called it a new fix for “Twitter junkies,” allowing them to capture and share their lives without limiting themselves to typed status updates. Terrell Owens appeared in one of the featured videos, and we partnered with Extra on an iPad giveaway that used “Viddy” as the secret word.

Years later, the format feels completely normal.

In 2011, it was an open frontier.

Viddy was competing with Socialcam and other venture-backed mobile-video companies. Vine would soon enter the market. The category was highly competitive, well funded and extremely frothy.

Everyone was chasing the behavior that TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts would eventually make universal: open your phone, capture a brief moment, enhance it and share it with an audience.

We could see where social media was heading.

The question was which company would get there first.

Getting the Cool Kids Onto Viddy

The early growth did not come from one traditional advertising campaign.

Chris and I met with everyone.

We talked with technology leaders, creators, influencers, talent agencies, celebrities, athletes, consumer brands and entertainment companies. We showed them how Viddy could fit into launches, promotions and their existing relationships with fans.

I was often the creative person in those meetings.

My role was to help people imagine what they could do with the platform.

A musician could preview a song. An athlete could respond directly to fans. An actor could share something from behind the scenes. A brand could turn a product announcement into a stream of participatory videos.

We were not simply asking people to download another app.

We were pitching them on a new behavior.

#StrayDay With Michael Strahan

One of my favorite celebrity programs was #StrayDay with Michael Strahan.

Strahan created hundreds of personalized Viddys and used the platform to call out friends, engage fans and bring his considerable personality into the community.

The Next Web covered the #StrayDay takeover, while Entrepreneur reported that the videos were distributed through Strahan’s network of more than 600,000 followers.

The campaign also received national coverage from NBC News, further demonstrating how one celebrity’s genuine participation could generate attention for both the person and the platform.

It worked because it did not feel like a celebrity appearing in a conventional commercial.

Strahan participated.

He made videos, responded to people and treated the platform as a place where something was happening.

That was the kind of activation Viddy did best.

Shirtless Bieber and a Room Full of Laughter

Justin Bieber became one of the most important celebrity names connected with Viddy.

During one discussion with his team, I suggested that Bieber make a Viddy without his shirt on.

The room laughed.

It sounded like one of my more ridiculous ideas.

Then Bieber eventually posted a Viddy from behind the scenes of a magazine cover shoot.

He was shirtless.

The video was enormous.

The Los Angeles Business Journal later documented how Bieber’s shirtless video went out to his tens of millions of followers as Viddy experienced its explosive growth.

My point in the meeting had not simply been that people wanted to see Justin Bieber without a shirt. It was that social video worked when a celebrity gave fans something immediate, personal and slightly less controlled than a traditional publicity asset.

A polished commercial could appear anywhere.

A shirtless, behind-the-scenes video felt like access.

Red Carpets, Athletes and Thumb Wrestling

The work took me into some wonderfully strange situations.

I attended a red-carpet event with Rihanna.

I went to parties with Warren Sapp.

I challenged Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno to a thumb-wrestling match. Then I threw the match and let the Olympic champion win.

We helped athletes, musicians and entertainment personalities think about what they could share in 15 seconds and why their fans would care.

These were not simply celebrity sightings for me.

They were product demonstrations.

Every time a recognizable person created a Viddy, the platform became easier to explain.

Meek Mill, Dirt Bikes and Fan Participation

We worked with Meek Mill on a campaign inviting fans to post videos of themselves riding dirt bikes and four-wheelers.

People used a Meek-related hashtag for the chance to win a bike.

The campaign made sense for the artist, the audience and the platform. It invited people to create something instead of merely watching an advertisement.

Southwest Airlines used a similar participation model, giving away free airline tickets to people who created and posted Viddys.

Viddy could turn a promotion into a behavior.

The brand provided the reason to participate. The users provided the content. The community spread it.

Forbes examined how Viddy helped make brands feel more human, while Fast Company explored the combination of product, community, celebrity participation and brand partnerships behind the company’s growth.

I Became Viddy’s Version of Myspace Tom

Community became one of my biggest responsibilities.

People who used Myspace might remember Tom Anderson. Every new Myspace user automatically began with Tom as their first friend.

Viddy had its own version.

Me.

My username was YourFriendEvan, and new Viddy users began by following me. I became the first familiar face inside the platform for millions of people.

At one point, roughly 10 percent of Viddy’s total user base followed my account.

That changed my job.

New users wanted my attention. Early adopters wanted me to notice their videos. Creators wanted help getting discovered. Celebrities and brands wanted to know how they could reach the community.

I watched videos, replied to users, highlighted creators and helped people understand what the platform could become.

I became a human connection between the company and its community.

It was not scalable in the conventional sense.

It was personal, and that was why it worked.

Turning Online Community Into Real Community

We did not want Viddy to exist only inside a phone.

We organized meetups around CES, SXSW, Los Angeles and other places where technology, entertainment and culture gathered.

One of my favorite events was the Viddy Splash Mob.

The name was a play on “flash mob,” except ours happened on the beach in Venice. We brought tacos, drinks, water toys and everything else needed for a proper Southern California beach day.

People came to meet the team, make videos, spend time together and put real faces to the usernames they had been following.

That community energy was part of Viddy’s appeal.

The company was headquartered near Venice Beach, not in a traditional Silicon Valley office park. Entertainment executives, artists, programmers, marketers, skateboarders, celebrities and startup people collided in the same neighborhood.

Viddy felt like Los Angeles.

When People at SXSW Started Yelling “Viddy!”

In March 2012, we took the company to South by Southwest in Austin.

JJ and I rode around downtown in a Viddy-branded pedicab. People on the street recognized the name and yelled, “Viddy!”

The Los Angeles Times captured that moment, identifying me as Viddy’s chief marketing officer and reporting that the app had approximately 900,000 active users through Facebook.

Only a year earlier, SXSW had barely been on the company’s radar. Now people at one of the country’s most important technology gatherings were calling our name from the sidewalk.

Viddy was also becoming part of the larger Los Angeles technology scene. At the Microsoft and Bloomingdale’s Geek 2 Chic charity fashion show, I walked the runway as Viddy’s CMO and recorded the audience using the app.

Every event, celebrity interaction and media appearance gave us another way to demonstrate the product.

Then Facebook Open Graph Turned On

The most dramatic growth arrived through Facebook Open Graph.

Open Graph allowed activity from connected apps to appear inside Facebook. When someone created, watched or interacted with a Viddy video, that activity could travel into the person’s Facebook network.

Friends saw the video and clicked.

Some joined Viddy.

Then their activity introduced the app to more friends.

The loop was astonishing.

I remember watching the internal numbers rise:

Ten thousand new users.

Thirty thousand.

Fifty thousand.

One hundred thousand.

Two hundred thousand.

Four hundred thousand.

Six hundred thousand.

Nine hundred thousand.

Then more than one million new users in a day.

I remember days around 1.2 million, 1.3 million and even approximately 1.4 million.

The published reporting confirms the extraordinary trajectory. Facebook reported that Viddy’s community had grown beyond 16 million registered users after its Open Graph integration. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported that Viddy moved from approximately 300,000 new registrations a day to more than 500,000 as it passed 27 million users.

We were watching network effects happen in real time.

Number One in the App Store

By April 2012, Viddy had become the top free iPhone app in Apple’s App Store.

We had approximately eight million users at that point. Facebook-powered growth continued pushing the number higher.

Venture capital followed.

Viddy raised $30 million in a funding round reportedly valuing the company between $350 million and $370 million. Investors included Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, NEA and Battery Ventures, alongside a remarkable group from technology, sports and entertainment.

The New York Times covered investments from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment.

Private planes arrived at Santa Monica Airport. Meetings filled the calendar. Media outlets compared us with Instagram, which Facebook had just agreed to acquire for approximately $1 billion.

My equity was suddenly worth an extraordinary amount of money on paper.

For a while, it looked as though Viddy might become one of the defining social platforms of the mobile era.

Facebook Did Not Single-Handedly Kill Viddy

It would make a clean story to say Facebook turned off the traffic and Viddy died.

It would also be incomplete.

Facebook’s changes were devastating. We had become too dependent on a distribution system controlled by another company, and the decline in referrals exposed that vulnerability very quickly.

But Viddy also faced strategic decisions.

We had opportunities to sell or form larger strategic relationships while the company was hot.

Those opportunities did not become completed deals.

AOL Was Still a Serious Player

It can be easy to forget now, but AOL remained a serious digital-media company at the time.

I remember AOL as a potential Viddy buyer and understood that an offer was in play. I was not part of the final board-level negotiations, and I have not found public documentation confirming the proposed terms, so I cannot responsibly state a price or characterize the offer beyond my recollection.

From inside the company, however, AOL felt like a real possible outcome.

It was one of multiple moments when Viddy might have become part of a larger company while we still had extraordinary market attention.

That did not happen.

Twitter Came Calling

Twitter was also interested in Viddy.

The exact nature of those discussions remains disputed publicly.

Business Insider reported that Twitter approached Viddy with an acquisition offer of approximately $100 million. The article framed what happened afterward as the kind of startup story that would “make your stomach turn.”

Wired also reported that Twitter’s interest was in the neighborhood of $100 million and presented the decision not to sell as one of Viddy’s critical missed opportunities.

Later reporting offered a more qualified account. Viddy board members confirmed that discussions with Twitter included the possibility of an acquisition, but maintained that a formal offer was never ultimately delivered.

I was not part of the final board-level negotiations, so I cannot resolve that contradiction.

From where I sat inside the company, Twitter’s interest felt real. I believed there was an opportunity for Viddy to become part of something larger.

That opportunity did not become a completed transaction.

Twitter subsequently acquired an unlaunched short-video startup called Vine for a reported $30 million.

Vine launched in January 2013 and quickly became the next major name in short-form social video.

Viddy’s closest competitor, Socialcam, also found an exit, selling to Autodesk for $60 million.

Facebook’s distribution changes hurt Viddy badly.

But the full story also includes strategic opportunities that did not close while the company still had extraordinary leverage.

The Numbers Stopped Climbing

The daily number would hold around 1.3 million.

Then it would slip.

Perhaps 1.2 million.

Then 1.1 million.

Then one million.

Then 500,000.

Then 400,000.

Then 100,000.

Then almost nothing.

That is how I remember watching it happen.

Facebook changed how video applications could use Open Graph and how aggressively their activity appeared in the News Feed. The distribution loop that had introduced Viddy to millions of people weakened dramatically.

But the company was also trying to answer much harder questions.

How many registered users were becoming lasting community members?

How would Viddy make money?

Could the product evolve quickly enough?

Should we sell, raise more money or keep pursuing the enormous independent-company outcome everyone had imagined during the peak?

Could we maintain relevance as Twitter prepared Vine and Facebook owned Instagram?

The audience was real.

The business around that audience was not durable enough.

Fifty Million Users Still Happened

The story did not end the moment Facebook distribution declined.

Viddy continued building. The company launched on Android and reported approximately 40 million registered users by December 2012.

The eventual public number was 50 million users, the figure reported when Viddy announced its shutdown in 2014.

My California Lutheran University alumni recognition describes my work as helping take Viddy from 50,000 users to more than 50 million.

Those numbers remain an extraordinary achievement.

But registrations and durable community were not the same thing. Explosive acquisition did not automatically create a business capable of surviving the loss of its primary distribution engine.

Then I Tore My ACL, Again

As the business struggled, I was playing in an intramural startup football league in Santa Monica.

JJ threw the ball.

I went for it.

I injured my knee and tore my ACL, again.

I spent the following week working from home. Then Chris called and asked me to come into the office.

I was on crutches. I called a Lyft, made my way to Venice and spent a few hours working in my office.

Then someone told us to come into the large meeting room.

Most of the team was there, but not everyone.

The company laid off roughly two-thirds of us at once.

After the meeting, I walked out of the room on my crutches. I passed the remaining third of the team gathered outside, talking about what had happened and perhaps waiting to hear what would happen to them.

I did not stop.

I went outside, called another Lyft and went home.

The equity that had once looked as though it might be worth millions ultimately became worthless.

The Exit That Finally Happened

Viddy continued after my departure.

The company eventually rebranded as Supernova and launched additional products. In January 2014, Fullscreen acquired Supernova for a reported $20 million, a fraction of Viddy’s peak valuation.

Fullscreen was interested in the company’s team and mobile-video expertise, but the original Viddy app was eventually shut down.

The outcome was not nothing.

But it was far from what appeared possible when Viddy was number one in the App Store and private jets were landing in Santa Monica.

What Viddy Taught Me About Borrowed Audiences

Viddy was not a fake business or an imaginary success.

We built an innovative product before the market had settled on how mobile social video should work. We reached tens of millions of people. We became the number-one app. We created a community, attracted important investors and helped make short-form mobile video understandable to mainstream audiences.

We were early.

But being early is not the same as being protected.

The largest lesson was about distribution.

If one platform supplies an enormous percentage of your growth, that platform is not merely a marketing channel. It is a structural dependency.

You do not own its algorithm.

You do not control its policies.

You do not decide when the traffic begins or ends.

The second lesson was about timing.

A company can be worth hundreds of millions on paper and still fail to produce that outcome for its founders, employees or investors. A strategic opportunity only matters if the parties complete it.

The third lesson was about the difference between attention and durability.

Media coverage, celebrity participation, investor excitement and millions of registrations can produce an extraordinary moment.

They do not automatically produce retention, revenue or a lasting business.

Viddy Was Right About the Future

Viddy did not become the winner of mobile social video.

But the behavior we were betting on became one of the most important forms of communication in the world.

People now record short vertical videos, add music and visual effects, and distribute them through enormous recommendation engines every day.

TikTok made it mainstream. Instagram built Reels. YouTube launched Shorts.

Viddy saw that future years earlier.

Our product was right about the direction of culture. Our company simply did not become the permanent home of that behavior.

That distinction matters.

A startup can correctly predict the future and still fail to own it.

What Came Next

After Viddy, I kept building.

I started Beach Mobile, Inc. and helped create the Boardwalk App, a hyperlocal product designed around the Venice Boardwalk community.

I carried the experience with me: Jeffrey’s introduction, the empty office, the celebrity meetings, the private jets, the beach events, the million-user days, the missed exits, the worthless equity and the Lyft ride home on crutches.

Viddy gave me a front-row seat to both sides of startup mythology.

I saw what it looks like when everything starts working at once.

I also saw how quickly momentum can disappear when distribution, strategic decisions and market timing all begin moving against you.

Today, when I help companies build public relations, community, content and market memory, I think about that internal dashboard.

The numbers went up faster than almost anything I had ever seen.

Then they went away.

The audience was real.

The road to reach it was rented.

And the moment to turn that attention into something permanent did not stay open forever.

Explore more of my work or contact Evan White PR to build visibility across channels you can sustain.