9gag’s Ray Chan: ‘We were crazy, but not crazy enough to think it would grow this big’

How many hours of your life have you hurled into the black hole that is 9gag? For much of our team, the answer is a lot. “I’m sorry for wasting your time,” quipped 9gag co-founder Ray Chan when he took to the stage last week at our Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 event.

He was there to give his side of the 9gag story. What started out as a side project in 2008 has now turned into a viral media powerhouse where millions of people each day converge for GIFs, gags, and vids.

Chan started 9gag in his native Hong Kong because, at that time, “Facebook was not popular in Hong Kong,” he says, where people mostly used MSN Messenger. But Microsoft’s now-defunct IM app wasn’t much fun to use. “It was difficult to share funny pictures,” Chan explains, due to the fact that you had to upload the image every single time to show each new buddy. That was the genesis.

After initially starting up 9gag alone, his younger brother later joined. “We were crazy, but not crazy enough to think it’d grow to this size,” said Chan, to laughs from the conference audience.

Silicon Valley adventure

Now 9gag has 3 million daily active users, and about 50 to 80 million monthly unique visitors, Chan says. For a sense of scale, Buzzfeed reported 80 million unique visitors in October 2013, and has since grown to about 200 million.

Most of its traffic comes from the US and Germany. Chan concedes that not many readers are in Hong Kong – “It’s mainly just 9gag’s team!” – because people prefer content in Chinese.

Though Hong Kong is now getting into the swing of building up a startup ecosystem, it was a lot tougher for 9gag’s team when they were starting out. Most rich people in Hong Kong make money from real estate, Chan explained, so few people understand the web business there. When it came time for 9gag to find funds, Chan knew he had to head to the US.

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In 2011, Chan got his crew into 500 Startups – not to work on 9gag, but to build up a photo-sharing app they we working on. Now Chan dismisses that app and their other concepts as “irrelevant ideas,” but he says they got a lot out of Dave McClure’s incubator by meeting many good mentors there. In 2012, Chan flew all seven members of the 9gag team at that time to Silicon Valley to make connections and ran into Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, who invited them to join YC – even though they’d been rejected from it beforehand. (Disclosure: Tech in Asia is also a YC graduate. See our ethics page for more information.)

As one of the few startups to go through both 500 Startups and YC, Chan is in a good position to see the differences. He says that YC focuses on engineers, while 500 Startups zones in on ideas and things. Both approaches helped the scrappy Hong Kong team. He added that YC tells teams to “make things people want,” while 500 Startups was more about using data to validate. Being data-informed helps a lot in reducing the chances of failing even when taking huge risks, explains Chan.