Photo-based MXit app shows impressive growth — 400k users in one month

An app inside mobile social network MXit is showing some fairly impressive growth.

The app, called JudgeME, was developed by mobile social network builder Motribe and reportedly helps people meet each other by uploading and browsing photos.

The South African-based company claims the app has gained over 400 000 users less than a month after launching and that it is “already generating enough revenue to cover its costs”.

The company says this growth happened faster than it could scale the technology to manage the demand.

Motribe CEO Nicholas Haralambous reckons one of the reasons the app has grown so quickly is the sheer volume of users already on MXit and their hunger for new and innovative services.

During its first month the JudgeME app served 31-million page views and its users rated 3-million photos.

Motribe also claims that around nine percent of the app’s users bought something using MXit’s virtual currency in the same time period, generating over 100 000 successful transactions.

“When you point ten million active users at something it’s like washing your face with a firehose,” says Motribe co-founder and CTO Vincent Maher.

He reckons that building for MXit is really easy because it does all the “heavy lifting”:

“The normal problems with user registration, profiling and retention are already taken care of so developers can focus on getting the most out of the technology and focus on good ideas.”

Motribe claims it built JudgeME in less than a week using MXit API. It employed standard mobile web programming and Amazon Web Services for extra cloud computing klout.