

How We Went From 1M To 100M Users In 6 Months - valceder
http://blog.crossrider.com/post/27337141823/1m-to-100m-users

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richardv
This reminds me of all of those times that people would tell you that their
websites get 100k+ hits per day.

Um.. no you don't, you have 100,000 requests to your servers per day. Each
page request generates a subsequent 248 requests for assets. You actually get
403 requests per day.

O wait, what's that? You are including "spiders" and other web crawlers in
this statistic? What happens if you filter these out?..

100 unique visitors per day! Nice! (So you only just tried to mislead me by a
factor of 1000.)

Some people need to learn how to report MAU/DAU/uniques/views/impressions.

These all mean different things.

To say you have grown 1M to 100M _users_ is really disingenuous and a
maniuplative use of ambiguity...

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dangrossman
xSwag made an interesting but auto-killed comment that implies most of these
installs are from malware. Is there truth to that?

> Oh wow that is really hilarious. The majority of application downloads from
> your network are worms, specifically the lilyjade worm (browser extension),
> which, once installed, spams peoples facebook to exploit pages where the
> extension is again installed and used for click-fraud. Funny how it takes
> your team over two months for application takedowns. You're more than aware
> that a vast majority of you're users are from lilyjade variants. Now you're
> taking credit for malware downloads. Those aren't 100M users, they're 100M
> downloads. Stop hyping yourself up. Further reading if anybody is
> interested:

> [1] [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/05/facebook-takes-aim-at-
> cro...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/05/facebook-takes-aim-at-cross-
> browser-lilyjade-worm/) [2] [http://www.exposedbotnets.com/2012/05/facebook-
> lily-systemma...](http://www.exposedbotnets.com/2012/05/facebook-lily-
> systemmalware-downloader.html)

~~~
xSwag
For some I can only see my comment when I'm logged in. Is it because it got
flagged or something?

Also: *your

~~~
detst
If it was auto-killed, it's for something you did in the past. It will only be
visible to users that are logged in with "showdead" enabled and you
(presumably to make spammers and trolls think their comments are visible). But
I can see this comment so maybe someone didn't like the other one and flagged
it.

~~~
dangrossman
It's not for something he did in the past or this comment you're replying to
would be dead as well. He's not hellbanned. It was probably just a duplicate
form submission. When you double submit the comment form, the second copy of
the comment is automatically killed, but on the poster's screen it looks like
both comments are there. You delete the first one instead of the second, and
you end up in this situation, with one [dead] copy of your comment.

@xSwag, I wanted to let you know about the [dead] comment directly, but
couldn't find a way to contact you here or anywhere else you might use the
same username. There's no e-mail/twitter/etc in your profile.

~~~
xSwag
I was using nightly firefox build so that is probably why it submitted twice.
I have updated my profile with my e-mail now. Thanks!

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bconway
Isn't it disingenuous to say you have 100M users? That's like Apple saying
they have 25 billion iPhone (SDK) users because people have downloaded that
many apps. (Note: world population still ~7 billion.)

~~~
adventureful
Extremely disingenuous. In fact it's a lot closer to flat out lying. The
extension creators have 100 million users, not them.

They have 7,000 users (developers). They're basically taking credit for all of
the work done on all of the extensions and claiming all of the users
accordingly

~~~
majani
The worst part is, they could have said that they had 7k developers who in
turn have 100m users, and we'd still be impressed. Instead they just smeared
egg all over their own faces.

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michaelbuckbee
We were one of the early Crossrider adopters and they've been consistently
great and above board in terms of support and improving the product.

The majority of our users (Sales People) have never even heard of installing a
browser extension so I'm not terribly surprised to hear about the crazy Google
"Crossrider Uninstall" options.

This probably also isn't helped by inconsistent branding between the extension
name 'by Crossrider', on Windows the browser helper is called
'crossrider.exe', etc. which the users won't be familiar with as they likely
haven't even visited Crossriders site.

One last note as to the 'inflated' numbers for Crossrider, they actually
directly serve up and push updates from their servers so they're more
connected to the users than just having a download. It might make more sense
if they had said: "Supporting 100M users for X Customers" or something.

~~~
valceder
Thanks for the positive feedback Michael. We definitely view our framework as
one created by developers for developers and are happy to power so many
awesome extensions.

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amirf
Developers always faced the annoying decision of choosing a certain browser
and losing a huge chunk of other browser-users, or maintaining several
branches of code that is supposed to do the same thing. Well done & Congrats!

~~~
valceder
Thanks amrif, that's exactly what our aim is, to let developers get the most
out of their extensions on ever browser.

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jaredsohn
As an extension author, one problem with using Crossrider is that you lose
control over the code that is being distributed to users.

At least that's my understanding from reading about Crossrider on Reddit
([http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/inkl0/crossrider...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/inkl0/crossrider_plugins_are_still_dangerous_be_careful/))
where they alleged, for example, that Crossrider extensions changed users'
default search engine.

~~~
amirf
I think this proves quite the opposite. As a developer, you can decide if you
want to change your users' default search engine (which will probably annoy
them a lot), or do anything you want. It's a platform.

~~~
jaredsohn
The fact that Crossrider provides APIs for doing things like that is okay.

My general (perhaps theoretical) concern is that Crossrider is putting
themselves in a powerful position by having their software running on 100
million peoples' machines (likely less since some people have installed
multiple Crossrider extensions). If Crossrider decided to go evil and start
monetizing those extensions, as an extension author I would likely get the
blame since the user installed my software and not Crossrider.

A lot of this likely depends on what their business model is. For example, is
Crossrider spying on users' browsing experience and monetizing that data? If
not, do they have the right to do that in the future?

------
focuser
Growing from 0 to 1M users is probably harder than from 1M to 100M.

~~~
vladd
It really depends on the market size. If you have 1M users which are 40% of
the market, it's often difficult. (and expanding in a larger market often
implies risks similar to a regular startup).

But if you are in a 1 billion market, your growth rate is impressive and you
make data-driven decisions to manage your future growth, then yes, 0 to 1M was
harder.

Warren Buffett has a quote for this: "Life is like a snowball. The important
thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill". Even if you find wet snow,
it's important to look how long the hill really is.

Larry Page uses the toothbrush test: he wants to invest in products that
people would use like a toothbrush, twice each day.

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benjlang
Awesome story, going to try out your platform.

~~~
valceder
Thanks benjlang!

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CubicleNinjas
Very cool idea. Excited about the possibilities here!

Wish there was more meat to this post though...nothing but the wireframe of
what you did to get there.

~~~
valceder
Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the idea of the Crossrider framework.
To find out more about us take a look at our website: www.crossrider.com

~~~
CubicleNinjas
Thanks – I appreciate the note.

Our team did check it out and toss it into our bag of tricks. It looks like a
very cool idea that would be fun to build with.

Congrats again on the success.

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mnemonicsloth
Internet Explorer = Retarded Kid in a Helmet.

Would it be acceptable to depict IE as a ditzy girl, a pigeon-chested
homosexual, or a black student with a failing report card? No.

But for some reason, the image a glue-eating retard is fair game. Why?

(FWIW the helmet should signify _autistic_ , not retarded, because because
autistic children are the ones that tend to be self-injurious. And autistics'
IQs are all over the place. But I don't think that cartoon is trying to say
that Internet Explorer has trouble relating to people because it processes
information very differently from the rest of us.)

