Company adds 50,000 new subscribers in less than 6 months

Ok. I want to tell a little story. I have truly been able to watch an unbelievable growth pattern for a company called Woopra. I happen to know one of the owners personally. I had lunch with him yesterday and we talked about how quickly things grew.

They grew to 50,000 members (i believe over that many now) within a short period of time I believe less than 6 months.

For one... the software is amazing... I use it on my sites. It's real time analytics software that shows you all kinds of relevant info and you can see each visitor in real time on your screen. You can even chat with them if you want, but I have never tried that.

The reason I bring this up, is I figured out 4 fundamental things that seemed to have helped Woopra grow at a staggering rate.

1) The software (as I mentioned before) is truly unbelieveable.

2) The software (while in beta) is FREE!

3) They Launched at a WordPress (word camp)... So imagine hundreds of bloggers going out immediately and blogging about the coolest thing they had just seen.

4) They also happened to get immediate publicity that day on Geekbrief.tv

What do all these things add up to...

a) awesome value
b) FREE
c) great marketing and timing
d) Great Publicity

I think we can all think up some ways to mimick those 3 items above. I know I have started using this in my marketing. I did a relaunch of some of my products that I used to charge for and now am giving away for free, and have noticed the requests started to pour in faster.

Anyone want to share in any of their experiences like this?