Path, a new social networking, photo-sharing and instant messaging service, aims to keep you closer to your friends and families, and from all accounts it seems to be doing a pretty damn good job of that. This week, it announced its hit the 10 million user mark, and is reportedly growing by a staggering one million new registered users per week.

It’s quite surprising to hear of new social sites reaching such big user milestones, since they have Facebook and Twitter to compete with, but at the same time it’s also quite refreshing.

Path also brings some ‘fresh’ ideas to the social scene too. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which allow 5,000 friends and unlimited followers respectively, Path only allows users to add a maximum of 150 friends. According to Dave Morin, the limit ensures that users only have a high quality connections on Path.  What it means is that you’ll be selective of the people you add, adding only the ones you actually want to keep in touch with.

But what else makes Path unique?  What else convinced 10 million-odd users to sign up?

According to Morin, Path first saw success in the Asian market, then the Spanish-speaking market, and now English-speaking markets are seeing the value of Path.

“For the first couple of years, we’ve had great growth in Asian markets — Japan, Korea, China even, Indonesia. We learned a lot about how things work over there,” Morin stated. He added that since the release of version 3.0,  which included improvements on finding friends, the ability to send text, voice, location, stickers, songs, books, movies, photos, and videos, Path has started to grow in different markets.

“It started with Venezuela, growing to something like 500,000 users over a weekend. Then it started to move across Spanish-speaking populations like Central America and Columbia. We also rolled out search in Spanish, and it went up the peninsula into Mexico, and jumped into the Caribbean. Then we saw an even bigger spike in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, and then it moved into the Spanish-speaking population of the U.S. We’re seeing a lot of pockets that were highly-connected to Puerto Rico,” Morin added.

Why Path Is On The Right Track

According to one Path user on Quora, what makes Path so successful is that from the start, its mobile app has been easy to use and almost flawless compared to the mobile efforts of Facebook.

Felix Hlatky, a Path user from the start, stated that its mobile interface, the pop-up menu, has an “incredibly intuitive design”. This is probably not surprising, considering the Path team six months to develop its app, and if you’ve ever used Path, “you can really feel this effort,” claims Hlatky.

Hlatky admits that Path has been criticized in some quarters, since most of its features are borrowed from other social sites, but the fact that it makes easier for people to share content to and from Path with other social sites turned it into the success it is now.

How Social Startups Can Make it Big

It isn’t easy to break into the social media scene and automatically start adding users.  Even if your product is awesome to the core, if no one knows about it, how can people use it and spread the word?  So if you want to be like Path and conquer the world in double-time, follow these simple tips and you’ll be popular in the blink of an eye.

• Make something you actually like and would use: This is what some people tend to forget. Many developers focus on what’s popular these days, or what might interest others, but that isn’t the way to succeed. Remember, whatever you create, you’ll be the first to use it. If you don’t like it yourself, discard it.
• Create your target market sheet: This will keep you in line with your goals.  If you want to appeal to a specific gender or age group, your target market sheet will help you do that.
• Hook up with Facebook page owners and see if you can offer anything for their followers, such as a contest they might be interested in.
• Search 5-10 keywords related to your product on Google, then go to the pages and leave comments containing links that redirect back to your own site.
• Reach out to existing users: This may sound desperate but it works. By reaching out to existing users, you become more personal, hence they will feel like you care about your customers.  So even if you don’t ask them to recommend your product, chances are they might just do so.  Just be careful to not sound too desperate, and to not step on boundaries. Always keep it professional.