Stardoll and Muxlim – two companies that see explosive growth through word of mouth

This afternoon at SIME Finland started off with presentations from Stardoll‘s Henrik Torstensson and Muxlim‘s Mohamed El-Fatatry. Both companies have grown through word of mouth by targeting a market no-one else was paying attention to.

Henrik shared some insights from the process of growing Stardoll, the paperdoll dressup site for girls:

Invest in making your product great and getting the best people rather than in marketing. This is not a question of either/or, but if you build the best product, people talk about it and are prepared to pay for using it. With an online property that dominates its market you become interesting for brand advertizers that usually don’t look at advertising with sites that are second or third on a local market even if the total number of users is larger than some local players.

Henrik says that having your tech team in the Nordics works well, and that going local globally has worked very well for Stardoll. Going global is more about scaling sales and support than scaling the tech team. Companies like Stardoll and Sulake (Habbo Hotel) have proved that a team in the Nordics can build websites that are liked and successful in many more markets.

Mohamed shared the story of Muxlim, the largest online muslim community, that grew organically from a small office at a university to a venture backed business trying to introduce the concept of the Muslim Lifestyle to the muslim community.

Muxlim tries to be a very open service that integrates other social services through Open Social and Facebook Connect. It wants to work as a complimentary service to other social spaces online.