The reaction from the Facebook community was positive, so the folks at Animoto decided to step it up a notch. They noticed that a significant portion of users who installed the app never made their first Animoto video — yet the application (as they themselves admit) relies heavily on the 'wow' factor of seeing your first Animoto video and wanting to share it with your friends. On Monday the team made a subtle but important change to their application: they auto-created a user's first Animoto video.

That did the trick!

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning.nullnull