How Perplexity Attracted 90 K Campaign Participants in 19 Days with Viral Loops

About Perplexity

Founded in 2022 in San Francisco, Perplexity is an AI-powered search and answer platform. It helps users research topics by searching the web and generating answers with links to its sources. 

The platform offers a free version, while its paid subscription, Perplexity Pro, offers more advanced capabilities.

Growth summary

In September 2024, Perplexity set out to grow its student user base through a back-to-school campaign that would encourage university students to bring their classmates onto the platform.

The campaign, called Race to Infinity, combined personal rewards with a collective incentive. 

Students could compete for prizes based on their referral performance—the more fellow students they brought in, the more chances they had to win a prize.

At the same time, their universities worked toward earning free Perplexity Pro access for their entire student body (a $200 value per student).

To put this idea into practice, Perplexity worked with the referral marketing platform Viral Loops, which developed additional referral functionality and API endpoints specifically for this campaign. 

The custom development took just one week, allowing Perplexity to launch the campaign without building its own referral system.

The campaign attracted more than 90,000 participants in 19 days, with referrals contributing a substantial share of signups. It was one of Viral Loops’ largest referral campaigns at the time.

The challenge: Launch a complex referral campaign on a tight deadline

Highlights:

• The need to attract more university students through a competition-based referral campaign.
• The complexity of running individual and university-wide competitions simultaneously, each with its own leaderboard.
• Different reward conditions for individual participants and entire universities.
• A tight timeline for launching the campaign.

Perplexity’s goal was to get more university students to try its platform by encouraging them to invite their classmates. 

But the company had something more elaborate in mind than a conventional referral campaign. It wasn’t as simple as just inviting friends and receiving rewards for every successful signup.

The idea was to introduce two levels of competition: 

1. At the individual level, students competed against others at the same university. Each successful referral would count toward their personal performance. The highest-ranking participants qualified for rewards.
2. At the university level, things worked differently. Every new participant would contribute to their school’s position on a separate leaderboard. The first 45 universities to reach 500 signups qualified for a free year of the Perplexity Pro plan for their students.

From a technical perspective, the setup wasn’t easy.

Viral Loops already supported referral campaigns with leaderboards. But its standard functionality was designed around a single leaderboard. 

Perplexity needed several leaderboards running simultaneously. Participants needed to be automatically assigned to their universities and their activity tracked at both levels.

Timing was also a factor. Perplexity contacted Viral Loops in late August 2024, aiming to launch the campaign at the beginning of the academic year in September.

With the campaign strategy already decided and the launch date approaching, Viral Loops had to meet these requirements within days.

The solution: Customizing Viral Loops for Perplexity’s enterprise needs

Highlights:

• Viral Loops developed custom referral functionality for Perplexity in just one week.
• The full campaign setup took approximately 10 days.
• A university-wide leaderboard tracked participation across different institutions.
• Separate leaderboards ranked individual students within each university.
• Viral Loops built a custom segmentation system that automatically assigned students to their universities based on their academic email domains.
• Custom API endpoints let Perplexity retrieve participant and leaderboard data from Viral Loops and use it in its own campaign interface.
• Perplexity’s development team built the campaign’s front end.
• Viral Loops supplied the referral infrastructure and backend functionality.
• Viral Loops worked directly with Perplexity’s developers to explain the custom functionality and support its integration into the campaign.

Perplexity already had its campaign strategy planned out. It needed Viral Loops’ technology to put it into action.

As an Enterprise customer, Perplexity could request functionality that wasn’t available in the standard plans. Viral Loops agreed to develop the additional features and work with Perplexity’s developers to integrate them into the campaign.

Meanwhile, Perplexity controlled the experience students would have on its website.

Developing custom referral functionality in one week

From early conversations with Perplexity’s team, the Viral Loops team knew the campaign would require functionality they didn’t have.

To track which university each student belonged to, we agreed to use students’ academic email addresses. For example, a Stanford University student who wanted to sign up needed to use an @stanford.edu email address.

Viral Loops came up with a custom internal solution called “referral segmentation” to check participants’ email domains and place them in the appropriate university group. That involved building a set of beta API v4 endpoints specifically for Perplexity.

The feature allowed the campaign to organize participants into separate groups and work with their referral data independently. We could maintain separate rankings for each institution without creating a separate referral campaign for every university.

The feature itself was developed in just seven days. Including the campaign configuration and meetings with Perplexity’s developers to explain how the new functionality worked, the entire setup took approximately 10 days.

Building individual and university-wide leaderboards

The first leaderboard, internally called the “master leaderboard,” ranked all participating universities by the number of students from each institution who joined the campaign.

But within each university, another competition was underway. Students had their own leaderboard, where their positions depended on how many successful referrals they generated.

Those who ranked highest received individual rewards.

The interesting part of this setup was that students competed against people they also wanted to recruit. 

Inviting a classmate could improve your own position in the rankings. Yet, that classmate could then start referring others and potentially overtake you.

Integrating referral data into Perplexity’s campaign experience

Perplexity’s developers built the campaign’s interface themselves. That included the pages where students could check their university’s position and follow their own progress.

Viral Loops handled what happened behind the scenes. Through its APIs, Perplexity retrieved the referral data and leaderboard information needed to populate those pages.

This arrangement gave Perplexity control over how the campaign looked and how students interacted with it. That also meant they didn’t have to build and maintain the referral system from scratch.

The result: Attracting 90K participants in 19 days

Highlights:

• Perplexity’s Race to Infinity campaign attracted more than 90,000 participants in the first 19 days.
• Around 80,000 participants joined during the first three to four days of the campaign.
• The campaign reached a 26% referrals-to-participants ratio.
• Seven universities reached the 500-signup threshold during the campaign’s opening days.
• A total of 45 universities qualified for a free year of Perplexity Pro for their students.

Perplexity’s campaign attracted over 90,000 participants in just 19 days, giving the company access to a large student audience early in the academic year.

With a 26% referrals-to-participants ratio, about one in four participants joined through the referral mechanism, meaning students themselves helped bring new people into the campaign alongside Perplexity’s other promotional activities.

The university competition also produced results. By the end of the campaign, 45 universities qualified for a free year of Perplexity Pro after reaching the required signup threshold.

For Viral Loops, the campaign demonstrated that its referral infrastructure could support a customized Enterprise campaign involving tens of thousands of participants, multiple rankings, and different reward conditions.

The implementation also gave Perplexity a way to run its referral program within its own website, without having to develop the entire system internally.

Final thoughts

Perplexity came to Viral Loops with an ambitious referral campaign that required more than the platform’s existing functionality could offer.

By choosing Viral Loops as its partner, Perplexity launched the campaign on schedule, attracted a large number of university students, and encouraged them to bring their classmates along.

The collaboration also showed how Viral Loops could adapt its referral software to accommodate a customer’s campaign strategy while leaving the customer in control of the experience. 

Book a free demo to see how Viral Loops can help your business attract new customers through referrals.