Shayan Zadeh: Practical Entrepreneur

A few months ago, Jeff (one of our rockstar engineers at Zoosk) had an idea: that our learnings from building Zoosk Messenger could be applied to chat on Facebook. After examining the capabilities and limitations of existing off-browser Facebook chat experiences, Jeff and I believed we could build a better, improved user experience. And that’s what we did. Jeff applied his magic to this new domain and, in a matter of a few weeks, he and his team debuted a new application that incorporated our original ideas. Socialbox was born.

Not knowing what to expect, we rolled out Socialbox and threw some traffic at it. Boy, did it stick. Unsurprisingly, consumers really wanted easier ways to chat with their Facebook friends. In only 6 weeks, Socialbox grew to approximately 2M MAU (see chat below courtesy of AppData).

Seeing this burst of interest, we took it one step further and added video chat to the product. We beat Facebook to video chat functionality on it’s own chat platform by a couple of weeks, which was really cool to achieve. It pays to be agile!

Video Chat for Facebook on Socialbox

In short, Socialbox is still a side project at Zoosk — but as long as consumers show love for the product we will continue to do awesome things with it. Socialbox is an example of how we encourage our team to approach their jobs at Zoosk. We reward creative thinking and we give our people the resources and support to turn their ideas into reality. We need more people who embody this commitment to innovation.