How Varnan Helped Git City Reach 19,000 New Signups in 48 Hours
Fri, Mar 6, 2026 · 10 min read
TL;DR
- Client: Git City, a 3D interactive city where every GitHub developer is a building
- Challenge: A genuinely novel visual project with no distribution strategy and a flat growth curve at 211 signups per day
- What Happened: The team at Varnan found the project organically, loved it, and posted a 33-second Instagram Reel. Not paid a promo or deal.
- Results: 55x growth in daily signups, 19,000+ new developers joined in 48 hours, 828K views, 51K likes, 97K interactions, 47,749 weekly visitors, 173,004 page views
- Then: Other creators picked it up and kept the chain going across X and Instagram
The Product: Git City
Git City is built by Samuel Rizzon. The concept is simple but the execution is something else. Every GitHub profile becomes a unique 3D pixel art building in an interactive city. Your contributions decide how tall your building is. Your repos decide how wide the base is. Lit windows show whether you've been active recently.
You can fly through the entire city in free flight mode and find any developer just by searching their username. You can compare two developers side by side, unlock achievements, customize your building with items from the shop, and download your profile as a shareable card.
The tech behind it is solid. Git City runs on Next.js 16, uses Three.js via react-three-fiber for the 3D rendering, Supabase for auth and the database, Stripe for payments, and is deployed on Vercel. Buildings use instanced meshes and a LOD system so the city stays performant even with thousands of developers loaded in.
The core appeal is that it turns something abstract, your GitHub contribution history, into something you can actually see, explore and share. That's what made it worth talking about.
The Challenge: A Great Product That Wasn't Moving
When Our Team came across Git City, the numbers were decent by surface-level standards. The project was doing around 211 signups per day. But that curve was flat. It had been sitting there.
The problem wasn't the product. The product was genuinely compelling and anyone who spent 30 seconds looking at it could see that. The problem was that most developers had never heard of it, and the ones who had stumbled on it had no obvious reason to share it further. Technical audiences tend to star something and move on.
There were three things working against it:
1. You Had to See It to Get It
Git City is a visual product. Reading a description of it doesn't land the same way as seeing a city full of glowing buildings where each one is a real GitHub account. Text posts, tweet threads, and GitHub README stars weren't going to do the job here. The project needed to be shown, not explained.
2. No Distribution Engine
Samuel had built the product and shipped it. But there was no content strategy, no creator partnerships, and no repeatable way to get it in front of new audiences. It was mostly relying on organic discovery, which in a sea of developer tools is a slow process.
3. The Cold-Start Loop
Without visibility, signups stayed low. Without signups, the city had fewer buildings and was less impressive to explore. Without an impressive city to explore, there was less reason to share it. Git City was stuck in that loop.
What Varnan Did: A 33-Second Reel
Our Team found Git City on their own. No outreach from Samuel, partnership discussion, or any deal of any kind. They just came across it, immediately understood why it would resonate with the developer audience they had built, and posted a 33-second Instagram Reel showing how every GitHub developer gets their own 3D skyscraper in the city.
That's it. Thirty-three seconds.
The Reel didn't use technical jargon. It didn't explain the architecture or the tech stack. It showed the city, showed a building, showed the connection to a real GitHub username, and let the visual do the work. The hook was immediate because the product itself is immediately visual. Varnan just matched the format to what the product actually was.
The Results: 48 Hours That Changed the Trajectory
The numbers from the next 48 hours are worth laying out clearly because they're not subtle.
Daily Signups
- Before: 211 signups per day
- Day 1 after the Reel: 7,415
- Day 2: 11,703
- Growth: 55x
Reel Performance
- 828,000 views
- 51,000 likes
- 97,000 interactions
- 19,000+ new developers joined the platform
Site Analytics (7-day window)
- 47,749 weekly visitors (+792% vs the previous period)
- 173,004 page views (+1,252.5% vs the previous period)
- 14.8% bounce rate, which is remarkably low and means people who landed on the site were genuinely exploring it
The Chain Effect: Other Creators Kept It Going
This is the part that separates a one-time spike from an actual trajectory change.
Once the original Reel gained traction, other creators started picking it up independently on X (Twitter). One developer with a large following posted about Git City describing the concept in plain language with a short clip of the city. That post alone crossed 128K views.
Another creator posted a video of the full city skyline, noting that you could even place ads in the city. That one crossed 190K views and pulled its own wave of engagement and replies.
None of that was coordinated. It happened because Varnan's Reel gave the concept a shareable shape, and other creators extended that reach without any coordination. The Git City GitHub repo sits at 2.3k stars and 111 forks as a downstream result of all of this.
The page view chart from Feb 26 through Mar 4 shows the steepest growth happening at the end of the window, which means the chain effect was still building rather than tapering off.
The Founder's Response
Samuel posted publicly about what happened:
Two weeks ago, Git City had 211 signups in a day. Yesterday: 7,415. Today: 11,703. 55x growth because one creator made a 33-second Instagram Reel about the project. @parasmadan9 from @varnan_labs posted a video showing how every GitHub developer gets their own 3D skyscraper in Git City. No paid promo, no deal. He just found it, loved it, and shared it. 828K views. 51K likes. 97K interactions. 19,000+ new developers joined in 48 hours. Paras, Varnan: you changed the trajectory of this project overnight. Thank you.
- Samuel Rizzon, Creator of Git City
The phrase worth noting is "changed the trajectory of this project overnight." Not a traffic spike that died in three days. A before and after.
Why It Worked
Git City is a clean example of matching content format to product type. The product is inherently visual and that means a 30-second video showing the city is worth more than five paragraphs describing it.
Paras understood that without needing a brief or a strategy doc. He saw the product, understood the format it needed, and made the call. That kind of creative judgment is what separates content that compounds from content that gets forgotten.
There's also something worth pointing out about the 14.8% bounce rate. When a traffic spike comes from poorly matched audiences, you see bounce rates above 70%. When it comes from people who actually wanted to find this product, they stay and explore. That's what happened here. The Reel didn't just drive volume. It drove the right people.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was this a paid promotion or a sponsored post?+
No. Our Team came across Git City on their own, thought it was worth sharing, and posted the Reel. There was no deal, no outreach from the founder, and no payment of any kind. Samuel himself confirmed this publicly. That's also part of why it worked - organic content from someone who genuinely finds a product interesting reads completely differently from a sponsored post.
Why did a 33-second Reel work when longer content might not have?+
Short-form forced clarity. Git City's core concept - your GitHub profile as a 3D building in a city you can fly through - lands in about five seconds once you see it. A longer video would have added more but not explained the concept better. Thirty-three seconds was enough to show the hook, let it sink in, and give people a reason to go find it themselves.
What made other creators pick it up without any coordination?+
Once something gets positioned clearly, other people can talk about it without needing a brief. The Reel gave Git City a simple, repeatable narrative: every GitHub developer is a building, contributions make it taller, you can fly through the whole city. That's easy to explain in your own words. So other creators did exactly that, and the reach kept compounding.
The bounce rate was 14.8%. What does that mean in practice?+
It means that out of the 47,749 visitors who landed on Git City's site during that 7-day window, over 85% didn't immediately leave. They explored. A typical traffic spike from poorly targeted content produces bounce rates of 60 to 80 percent. 14.8% tells you the Reel reached people who were actually interested in the product, not just anyone scrolling by.
Does this kind of result happen with every project Varnan works with?+
The distribution model is consistent. The specific numbers vary by product, audience size, and how visual the concept is. Git City is a particularly strong example because the product is inherently visual and the concept clicks instantly. But the underlying pattern - a single well-positioned video triggering a chain of organic sharing - is something Varnan has seen across multiple open-source projects. You can read those case studies here.
Three High-Impact Moves in 15 Days
Most of what you just read started with one move, the right product in front of the right audience. Varnan Ignition packages that into a fixed 15-day sprint, so you can watch the engine work before committing to anything longer.
Here's what's inside:
- Media on a 250K network. Your product placed in front of an organic audience of 250,000 through content built for it.
- A taste of Reddit marketing. Strategic placement in the communities your users already sit in, with a credible presence rather than a drive-by post.
- 5 design partners. Sourced from our founder and operator network, so you get structured feedback from people who have built and shipped.
The shape is simple: apply, a 45-minute onboarding call, 14 days of execution, then results in your hands. 15 days, $2,000, and you keep everything we build. No commitment past the sprint.
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