Bluesky is a new, open social network with a strong emphasis on user choice. Users can build their own home feed and seamlessly move between apps within the open ecosystem. Plus, if you ever decide to leave Bluesky or switch providers, you can take all your followers with you.

Breaking into a space dominated by incumbents like X and Facebook, both of which have high switching costs, is no easy feat. Yet Bluesky, founded in 2021, is on a mission to build an open social platform. They have created such a compelling offering that over 10 million new users have joined in the past month (as of December 2024).

Statsig’s product analytics provides the foundation for growth

Bluesky chose Statsig early on to build a data-driven culture. Their first priority was setting up product analytics to measure user engagement and track core metrics.

COO, Rose Wang, commented on the value they have realized since adopting product analytics:

“Statsig’s powerful product analytics enables us to prioritize growth efforts and make better product choices during our exponential growth with a small team.”

Rose Wang

COO, Bluesky

They built several growth dashboards accessible to every employee, enabling everyone to monitor and measure the impact throughout the product development cycle.

In late 2024, when Brazil banned X, Bluesky saw an influx of Brazilian users. As internet providers in Brazil began to enact the ban, Bluesky first saw the impact in their “posts by language” dashboard on Statsig, as the number of Portugese posts spiked upwards.

By leveraging custom growth dashboards, the Bluesky team was able to quickly respond to market changes, decide on the next features to build, and identify new opportunities for growth.

Experimentation validates ideas and drives key product decisions

Statsig soon unlocked more insights by enabling Bluesky to run hypothesis-driven A/B tests and has run over 30 experiments to date. CTO, Paul Frazee, noted the importance of augmenting qualitative user feedback with data from experiments.

“Bluesky collects a lot of feedback from users, but Statsig gave us concrete answers about what was working and what wasn’t. We thought we didn’t have the resources for an A/B testing framework, but Statsig made it achievable for a small team. It remains our best tool for evaluating product decisions.”

Paul Frazee

CTO, Bluesky

Bluesky hypothesized that their users preferred a chronological feed of people they follow (like the old days of social media) over algorithm-powered feeds. They used Statsig to run an experiment and quantitatively prove that their users wanted and enjoyed this style of browsing.

As Bluesky continues to experience exponential growth, Statsig scales alongside them enabling employees to continuously uncover new insights, develop new ideas to test, and create a flywheel for user growth.

Feature flags accelerate development and ensure confident releases

Mobile development comes with the challenge of app store delays, but Bluesky has found a way to stay agile by leveraging Statsig’s feature flags to easily control releases from a single control pane. Reflecting on how the team navigates these constraints, CTO, Paul Frazee, explained:

“With mobile development, our release schedule is driven by the App Store review cycle, which can sometimes take days. Using Statsig’s feature flags, we’re able to move faster by putting new features behind delayed and staged rollouts, and progressively testing the new features. We can revert rollout as well, which gives us a lot of peace of mind.”

Paul Frazee

CTO, Bluesky

Achieving clarity and confidence in product growth

In just 7 months, Bluesky has already realized the value of having core product development features including product analytics, experimentation, and feature flagging in one unified platform.

Using product analytics to track key growth metrics, experimentation to validate ideas and guide decisions, and feature flags for fast and controlled rollouts, Bluesky has embraced a data-driven culture that fuels their product development and growth.

And the net impact of it all? a 30% reduction of tears cried by the CTO (yes, this is a real quote from Paul Frazee).