
The 2009 TechCrunch Web App Survey Results - sant0sk1
http://webappsurvey2009.techcrunch.com/
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wayneyeager
Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but I wonder if 66 is an adequate sample size
when respondants are self-selected (as opposed to random).

(66 respondants can be deduced by finding the highest common denominator in
all the response percentages. In this case the HCD is 1.51515. So 100/1.51515
= 66.)

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lbrandy
Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but no sample size is adequate when the
respondents are self-selected :)

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Readmore
The last few charts are the most telling. The majority of free sites reported
$1-$5 in monthly revenue but the majority of subscription sites reported
$1000-$5000 a month.

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jah
Where's the option for subscription sites making < $1000 a month?

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stingraycharles
I was wondering about that too. Perhaps they all made more than $1000 a month
?

I couldn't find out how many startups they surveyed, so it might as well be
only 3 startups.

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javery
It would be awesome if they released the data in some form, the interesting
questions would be.. how successful are bootstrapped vs. funded? How
successful are multi-founder vs. single-founder. How do these number change
when you look at founding date, etc.

I always hate when I see good data put into charts that basically tells you
the least interesting part of the story.

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jrbedard
It would be interesting, they should derive that data from Crunchbase.

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kjhughes
It seems sloppily done:

The total number of participants is not stated.

What's with the overlapping or gapping ranges?

    
    
      The full-time categories all list 0, and 0-1, yet omit 2-4.
    
      Many range end-points are included in two ranges.
    

"If you raised money, house [sic] much did you raise..." (#14)

etc.

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gcheong
Looks like they made a mistake on the intervals in #14. 20,000- 100,000 then
10,000 to 500,0000 and then over 50,000?

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bradgessler
Its really hard to decipher this data. Is there a list of companies that
responded? That would help.

There are also a few really bad typos
([http://skitch.com/bradgessler/nbqen/re-
the-2009-techcrunch-w...](http://skitch.com/bradgessler/nbqen/re-
the-2009-techcrunch-web-app-survey))

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MicahWedemeyer
Gotta call bullshit on this one: _Percentage of active users on your free
plan_

Only 6% of sites have >50% of active users on their free plan? So, 94% of
freemium web apps have >50% conversion rates, and 43% have >99% conversion?
Guess that means I'm really, really bad at converting free -> paid.

It kind of makes sense when inverted, but that's a really bad typo.

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lsternlicht
Very difficult to believe (even rationalizing a success bias) that 60% are
generating $1,000-$10,000 when 55% have costs of less than $1,000.

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mrshoe
Looks like a really small sample size, about half of which are bootstrapped
startups with zero users. I'm not sure how useful this data is.

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kjhughes
Interesting how little funding the participants received: Only 18% of were
funded (#13), and 25% of those received less than $5k (#14).

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Jim_Neath
I hate pie charts.

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chaosmachine
And compression artifacts. They used JPEG instead of PNG :\

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avibryant
It's the correlations that would be interesting here - how does marketing cost
per user relate to revenue per user? How do monthly costs relate to number of
active users? Etc. Or even if we could see all these same pie charts, but
filtered to (eg) companies with between 20 and 50k in monthly revenue...

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dschobel
_If you raised money, what percentage of the company do the founders still
own?_

That's pretty depressing that more than 1 in 10 of the responding founders
said they owned less than 20% of their companies.

