ICQ – Free Chat Tool Turned Millions

In 1996, four Israeli men, two of whom didn’t even finish high school, Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir, is when ICQ (I Seek YOU) came into being. After their army service the four men thought about a holiday trip to India but decided to take jobs at a local computer store instead.

At night they worked on their dream project….a program for instant easy Internet communication. They called their company Mirabilis.

Internet service was very expensive in Israel, so the men moved to California and later to New York. It took less than 18 months for more than 10 million computer users to download and install ICQ. ICQ was free. It wasn’t advertised by a big time marketing campaign.

Those 10 million people had heard about ICQ by “word-of-mouse” advertising. What we call Viral marketing or Buzz marketing. Mirabilis said a firm ‘NO” to Microsoft, but accepted a 300 million dollar buy out from AOL. ICQ then quickly exploded to 100-million downloads and a million new subscribers each week.

The interesting thing about ICQ is their marketing…or rather the lack thereof. Journalist, Ami Ginsburg came to interview the Israeli founders, all the “marketing” they could show was a brochure they had once produced but that was hardly ever used.

They just didn’t do any marketing… at least nothing that resembled any marketing techniques up until that time. All of their efforts were directed at motivating the users to spread the word.

They made it easy to spread the word by using the standard e-mail that will invite your friends to join, but the software can also be instructed to scan your address book and send all your friends invitation letters. Their idea was to build a tool that includes an inherent mechanism for spreading the work and then just letting it grow.

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