Social Rank

Alex Taube and his co-founder Alex accidentally created a viral sensation when they coined the term "most valuable follower" and built an algorithm to reveal who your best Twitter follower was. Over 50,000 people tried it in the first week. This unexpected traction convinced Alex to leave his job and pursue Social Rank seriously.

The founders built Social Rank around 2.5 years prior to this 2016 interview. They started with a simple premise: there are plenty of tools for content analytics (what time to post, how posts perform), but no easy way to understand who your followers actually are. Their initial product was straightforward—pull in all your followers and make it easy to sort and slice them by location, interest, keywords, influence, and engagement. The original feature set included three ways to rank followers: Most Valuable (influential followers with high follower-to-follow ratio), Most Engaged (those interacting most with your content), and Best Follower (a combination of the two).

The founders structured Social Rank with a three-tier model: a free basic product, a $50/month premium tier for social media managers, and a Market Intelligence product for enterprises. They discovered their main use cases were agencies and public figures, particularly those running local events or campaigns. Rather than fighting for individual premium subscriptions, they used the free product as a loss leader—attracting users for free, then approaching them with the Market Intelligence solution once they saw the value. This hybrid model proved remarkably effective, converting free users into enterprise customers paying hundreds to thousands monthly.

By May 2016, Social Rank had grown from $5-7K MRR in 2015 to $50K MRR, achieving 30% month-over-month growth every month from January through May 2016. The key insight was that focusing solely on free users or paid individual subscriptions wouldn't work—the real money came from converting free users into enterprise customers. They only had "north of 50" paying customers for Market Intelligence, but these generated far more revenue than their 250,000+ free users. The premium $50/month tier, launched just two weeks before this interview, was positioned more as a lead qualifier than a revenue driver. The founder emphasized they didn't care much about total users or daily active users—only monthly recurring revenue and paying customer growth mattered.

With a small seed round of $2 million raised (split between 2014 and 2015), Social Rank had positioned itself to potentially hit a run rate of around $600K+ ARR by end of 2016 if the 30% monthly growth continued. The company had just hired a head of sales in 2016, marking a shift from ad-hoc customer acquisition to systematic enterprise sales. Alex had become a frequent contributor to Forbes and authored a book on business development and partnerships, establishing himself as a thought leader in the space.