

Ask HN: What was your user count/user growth since launch? - Eduard

Some of you have launched their own website / web service. I'm interested in how your user numbers developed within the first three or so years, on a monthly (or quarterly) sampling rate.
Alternatively, maybe you know of someone else's (successful or unsuccessful) business and its user count.<p>(Maybe you know of some article on the web that has already done what I'm asking for)<p>So it'd be great if you could give some information such as the following<p>~~~BEGIN Example~~~<p>type of business: B2C online shop for dog food<p>definition of user: a customer making one sale per quarter<p>("yxqz"= year x, quarter z)<p>y1q1:    10 users<p>y1q2:   100 users<p>y1q3:   150 users<p>y1q4:  1000 users<p>y2q1:   900 users (lost users because Christmas was over)<p>y2q2:  2000 users<p>y2q3: 10000 users (started big marketing campaign)<p>...<p>~~~END Example~~~<p>Background: there once was an "Ask HN" question about estimating user growth ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=780482 ). Consensus was: you cannot predict user growth, release your stuff and see what happens.<p>So possibly, with a diverse set of businesses and their user numbers, it may be possible to elicit a rough heuristics for different kinds of businesses.
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petervandijck
My rough heuristic for a free service is: get 100 new users a day and activate
them, you're getting started. get 1000 new users a day and activate them,
you're doing pretty good. And get 20% month over month growth and you're doing
great.

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soho33
i'm not sure about the quarterly without actually going in the database and
querying it but over the span of 3 years we went from 0 registered users to
150,000. Each user does not necessary mean a sale as our source of income is
purely based on the ads on our site since our content is free. It's a mobile
related website.

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Eduard
Great, thanks! Is it okay for you to have a quick look in your database and
get your user numbers for each quarter since launch? Maybe you can even
comment on each number regarding what caused it to develop that way (e.g.
"organic growth", "service featured on greatwebsite.com", "outage for a week")
?

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soho33
i will do it tonight when i get home :)

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petervandijck
For mefeedia (in 2005)

y1q1: 10K y1q2: 20K y1q3: 30K y1q4: 40K

Growth was prety linear.

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Eduard
dank u wel, Peter! How did you promote mefeedia? I'm curious to know what
caused the linear growth.

