Now At 1.4M Members, Fab.com Turns Up The Social With A ‘Live Feed’

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, December 16th, 2011
fabfeedd

Exclusive - Fab.com, the ridiculously fast growing e-commerce startup, is launching a new social shopping feature today that lets members view and interact with any activity on the design flash sales site in real-time.

Dubbed the ‘live feed’ and reminiscent of Facebook’s early iterations of what is now the News Feed, it captures what users are purchasing, sharing, commenting on etc.

The live feed adds a powerful social component to the e-commerce activity happening on Fab.com.

Importantly, while all activity on the site is shared with anyone visiting the live feed, users have the possibility to conceal their usernames when they buy or favorite something on the site. All people need to do to appear anonymously as “a Fab user” is flick a virtual switch on the top right.

Fab.com founder and CEO Jason Goldberg tells me social activity is mighty important to the company; more than 50 percent of its now 1.4 million strong registered user base were introduced to the site by people sharing items for sale at Fab on social networks.

You’ll notice that the feed refreshes constantly. No wonder, if you consider that Fab.com has attracted close to 1.5 million members and sold over 600,000 items in just six months.

Goldberg tells me that the partners of Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm that recently led a $40 million funding round for the company, have never seen an e-commerce site grow this fast.

At present, Fab’s annual revenue run rate is roughly $70 million. Again, in just six months.

The company employed 3 people in New York City back in February 2011, and now 90 (and 130 in total worldwide). The company just nabbed a former Etsy VP as COO, too.

Finally, make sure you DO NOT MISS Goldberg’s blog post about the recent fundraising bonanza.


Company: Fab
Website: fab.com
Launch Date: February 2011
Funding: $171M

Fab is on a mission to help people better their lives with design. Fab was founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg, Bradford Shellhammer, Nishith Shah and Deepa Shah in February 2011 and launched on June 9, 2011. Fab’s headquarters are in New York. The company also has offices in Berlin, London and Pune. Over 6 million people around the world use Fab to discover everyday design products at great prices, to connect with the world’s most exciting designers, and to...

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