2. Open Source Secrets: The
Architecture Behind a Successful
Virtual Goods Business
Timothy Fitz – IMVU Inc.

3. An online community where members use 3D avatars to
meet new people, chat, create, and play
What’s IMVU?

4. Company Overview
 Founded in April, 2004
 Based in Palo Alto, CA
 70 employees
 3 institutional rounds
 $30M raised

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45M
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ec-05
Jun-06D
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 3D avatars
 Virtual goods
 45M registered users
 10M uniques/month
 $30M+ revenue run rate
 Profitable
Cumulative Registrations
Snapshot
Registered Users

6. User-Generated Content
0.0
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2.0
2.5
3.0M
06/04
12/04
06/05
12/05
06/06
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06/07
12/07
06/08
12/08
06/09
3 Million
Virtual Items

7. Celebrating with Mohawks

8. Shameless Promotional Plug
We’re Hiring!
www.imvu.com/jobs

9. Overview
 Development Process
 Server Architecture
 Client Architecture

10. Always Be Shipping

11. Client: 1-2 releases/day
Website: 35-50 release/day

12. Ship Incremental Value

13. Always Release Ready

14. QA can’t afford to
repeat themselves.

15. Write tests for everything.

16. No tests? Not done.

17. Tests are a contract.

18. Commit. Go Green. Push.
Repeat.

19. Cluster
 Scaled up LAMP stack
 All state in memcache/MySQL
 No instance servers
 Dumb message bus for realtime

20. Cluster Size
 365 Apache nodes
 89 MySQL nodes
 107 Memcache nodes
 102 Perlbal nodes
 22 Mogile disk nodes
 15 solr nodes

21. Before…

24. HTML/JS

25. Not HTML/JS

26. Client Code by Language
Language Lines
C++ 168k
Python 129k
Javascript 36k
HTML 24k
CSS 13k

27. Shameless Promotional Plug
We’re Hiring!
www.imvu.com/jobs