Post by vikas

Here’s why your reviews matter so much more than just earning donations. You are literally transforming lives around the world and making the world more vegan!

I’m delighted to share that we just crossed 10 million people on @abillion since we launched in 2018!

That’s 10 million people around the world making vegan choices thanks to the work of our community.

I’m especially proud that 4 million of those people have come in 2023. In September we surpassed 12,000 new people daily. And October should be our best month ever.

It hasn’t come from spending money on ads and influencers. It’s come from the work our team has been doing on web, which until this year was largely ignored in our focus on the app. But we’ve learned that we can drive more growth and revenue alongside faster development through the web. And I’d like to share a bit more for anyone here that’s ever considered building an app.

A couple of things we’ve learned:
- The app is where our most passionate members are. The content creators and the folks that are very actively engaging with content.
- Everyone else shouldn’t need to download an app to experience abillion. We want them using the platform, we want their presence felt across the community, we want them spending money on vegan products and services.
- Web can be developed, iterated and deployed 10x faster.
- We are no longer at the mercy of Apple and Google’s rules for apps. Historically we lose a month of development time every year to Apple and Google’s constant changes. Our engineers are telling me I’m being optimistic when I say a month!
- Google is our best marketer for user growth and revenue, and it doesn’t cost us a thing.
- Google highly values and ranks user generated content higher.
- Our content is vast, across 188 countries, and lots of it. Allowing Google to index everything means Google is displaying millions of abillion pages to its users.
- The #1 reason people find us is because they Google a product and that leads them to abillion.
- Google is now ranking us on top search results for brands 1.2 million times daily. That’s 440 million times a year. That relevance makes our offering for brands much more interesting.

We can iterate faster on web, more cost effectively, and tap into a much larger group of people that need our help. Prior to 2023 we were spending 90% of our time on app development. In 2023, we’ve leaned into the web, starting by rearchitecting our most visited pages. We’ve made a lot of progress, but what gets me incredibly excited is how vast the opportunity is now that we’ve opened our eyes, and how many options we have to grow from here.

So proud of our team, our community, our incredible partners working to save lives. It takes all of us coming together to have created a service that’s being used worldwide, and for all the right reasons! Thank you!! It took us 6 years to reach 10^7. Next stop 10^8!