· Menlo Park, CA
Why AI Grew Faster Than Messaging Apps?
Gadu-Gadu infected Poland the way AI is infecting the world now — no marketing team, no features, just growth. What that wave felt like from the inside, and what it taught me about exponential adoption.
It’s very awkward that AI grew so big so fast. It had exponential growth, without exponential features. Why?
Gadu-Gadu was Polish example of business’s exponential growth. I must have my friends on a chat for it to exist. So the first thing I will do is to invite everyone that I want to talk to. Then there are the referrals I will get more audiobooks if I invite you to the app. Our benefits may be tiny: perhaps we can now share a list of audiobooks we both like. But it’s enough to get users growth growing exponentially. When you achieve two poles, you are in a great spot. If you do this, be aggressive: take all charges off of the account for users that are marketers. You will be essentially turning them from customer to an employee whose entire job is to bring you more users. That’s exactly what you want because if they invite 10 people it only takes one of those 10 to be like this person to get the exponential growth started. You pay fixed cost for the salaries of your full-time employees, and you decrease revenue by this one user, but you have the magnifying force for it. It’s the deal I would always take.
The most fun messaging app I used was Gadu-Gadu. I forgot about it for years, but in the recent months glimpses of it made me wonder: why is this long-gone massenger popping up in my brain uninvited? What triggers this reflection? This era is over, and that chapter of the Internet is long gone after all. At first I believed it’s because it was my first messenger, and building my new company makes me do many new things. There’s some aspect to this as well for sure. But then I focused on the timing, which is much like danger: you taste it with every atom of your body when it’s there. It’s how I recalled Gadu-Gadu and how AI is now. I had foot on a pedal, no shoes on, with every vibration wave shaking my body during both waves. It was the growth. The growth I think a lot about too, and with Gadu-Gadu and AI, the growth was unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Millions of people installed Gadu-Gadu, but it wasn’t just a viral software. Wherever I turned, I heard everyone talking about it. I saw everyone using it. Everyone in it. We swept skeptics with the wave of sheer optimism. It was like pandemic-scale event; except it was positive and impossible to isolate from. Think of an instant infection of the whole society with happiness, right at the time of its release
On a normal day I’d come home and fire a computer. This was a desktop program, and we didn’t have smartphones yet, so the act of pressing the physical button on the big gray boring PC case would start the dopamine-fused anticipation. My Pentium was darn slow, and this moment always triggerred a lot of thoughts in my head: “have I gotten replies I wanted” and “what order should I send messages to friends”.
Gadu-Gadu was bare. There weren’t any nickname. Instead of phone numbers that everyone knew how to lookup in the phone book, and instead of nicknames like in email or IRC, its makers picked consecutive numbers to identify people. The lower the number you had, the more of a pioneer you were. And you remembered your number like your phone or social security numbers now. Mine was 3455150. Within a second of program’s start, my “GG: 3455150” profile window would show queued messages arriving. Like in a famous Pavlov’s dogs & sausages experiment, I was getting programmed to like the like the program. Every message it triggered jingle. They didn’t bother to play sound once on some messages. They make noise for every message. One. By. One.
It had no support for images, so messages I were getting belonged to two sorts: replies from friends and messages from random strangers. Diversity of topics was stunning: one day I got a message from some guy who wanted to sell a car and decided to give cold-messaging a try. He must have messaged hundreds of people, because I still remember my neighbors and I joking about him in the elevator. He wrote to them as well. Then some other day a woman was looking for a long-lost high-school friend, and based on my last name, she approximated I may know such and such in her native town. And I did. My routine was to reply to it all, and when bored, I would then do all sorts of social experiments. Most of it was a total waste of time, but many good things came from that period too.
When I wanted to meet someone there were two ways about it: heads on and Guerilla tactic. The heads on approach I used on nerds. I remember meeting a good friend of mine, Michal. He was a Linux nerd, and a very good one, and I really wanted him to give me some command line wisdom. His brother who I begged, after weeks of refusing, finally gave me his GG number. It’s how I got one of my first mentors.
Now with the girls, the guerilla tactic worked better. In fact, it mimicked the real life, where often the direct approach was too brute to gain trust. The correct way was cold-messaging attempt. This is where the user directory came in handy. It was open and free-for-all database, where if I knew she is such and such, it was sure I’d find her within five minutes. You could decide how much data you put into the directory, but even with very little data, ZIP is a traitor. The ZIP code was mandatory and given how granular ZIPs are, it was a perfect way to geo-locate the other side. I kept my full data in the directory, and I would never remove my name and last name from the directory which was making things way faster for me, but my friends could talk to their next block neighbors for weeks without revealing who they are.
We used the whole thing as imperfect email half the time: typos were tolerated, and a distinct dialect developed on it. It gave gastric reflux to Polish teachers because kids invented words like “Papatki”, and they would use it in classes, and it was then impossible to eradicate.
The other half of time we used it as group therapy. I never read more personal details about other people than I did on Gadu-Gadu, and while I can’t think of a case where I had a meltdown over chat, I remember strangers having those. It was a wild-wild west of messaging without any identity verification whatsoever.
Also there is the explosiveness. The acronym “GG” penetrated flyers, business listings, personal business card. “GG” became a part of the vocabulary overnight. It started as Gee-eh Gee-eh, but then as more folks were getting their mandatory English as second language, it became Gee-Gee, which felt foreign, but also so familiar. We pronounced it in a very American way without realizing that in a far distant universe behind the ocean, ICQ already existed.
To give you an understanding of how explosive Gadu-Gadu grew, I’d say that if you had computer and a pulse, you were in it. It was a viral wave of software, before I knew that software going viral was possible. And we chose to be infect outselves: I doubt that Gadu-Gadu had any marketing team. The marketing was the virus of it. Where I lived, I knew neighbors who had zero use for computer - like plumbers or truck drivers, who borrowed money to buy a computer just to be in Gadu-Gadu.
What made Gadu-Gadu special were its unintended uses. Like dating and matchmaking. In fact, I was matchmaker several times. One girl chatted me up and the mission was clear: to match her with the cute guy I knew. We went to the same English school, and despite being in separate student groups and never sharing classroom together, she somehow tracked me down, got my GG from a friend of mine and spelled her wish. In the process, we then invested dozens of hours talking, in the process of becoming friends. When we finally met many weeks later, it was very awkward: she was shorter than I imagined, with funny glasses, and overall different appearance, but it’s peculiar way, the mind connection was there.
Dating and matching was very common. It was an example of the awkward social connections created by that new medium. Sort of interesting nobody is trying to marry AI and dating yet. It’s not that all this private data we feed to AI couldn’t be used to match people very well. I had 3 friends that married their Gadu-Gadu shmoozers. Perhaps I’ll see a human/robot couple too.
What shocked me with Gadu-Gadu was how brave the girls were. It was the first time that the random girl initiated the chat with me. All girls in my glass told me how shocked they were how many guys talked to them, so perhaps the feelings look the same from both sides. GG like AI was a serious confidence builder.
The access to Gadu-Gadu was omniscient. To this day I don’t know how guys that built it made money. It was ad free, and moderation free at inception, sort of like a landline, except we paid for landline. At zero monetary cost, it hit 10 million people and many millions more of messages.