

Ask 37signals: Numbers? - luccastera
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers

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hello_moto
I have 3-4 accounts with them, only 1 active. I'm sure there are other people
who have multiple inactive accounts.

EDIT:

I don't mean to dis-credit them. They have a steady income from those who like
to use their web-apps. They are also becoming the "role-model" for small web-
dev shops.

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fleaflicker
every free webapp has inactive/fake accounts. do you think myspace has 100M+
active users? i have a friendster account that's been collecting dust since
2003.

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hello_moto
MySpace posted unique users registered, traffics, pageviews etc. So out of
those 100M+ users, I'm sure they have higher rate of active users.

The other thing to consider is the limitation of 37signals product might raise
the number of users. For example: you can only have 1 project in Basecamp. A
solution for this would be to create another account.

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joshwa
That restriction is only for the free version.

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hello_moto
Excuse me for not pointing out the limitation is there for "free account".
Either way my point stands still. There are people who don't want to pay for
their service thus they chose this way. Once they're done with the project,
they just don't bother login-in anymore. Kinda one-off situation.

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henning
But Rails doesn't scale!

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tocomment
I'm curious to see some hacker discussion on this, though I can't think of
anything to contribute myself...

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michaelneale
Me too. The numbers look good. I presume they must be nicely profitable for
those numbers. Unless the hardware and energy costs are too high (rails is a
bit power hungry).

I wonder why they took on investment from Jeff Bezos - maybe it really it just
to have involvement of Jeff Bezos (which would be entirely sensible) not to do
with money.

Good on them I say.

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robmnl
It's probably not about the money.

Nice numbers that they have there, much more than I expected.

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edw519
Stupid follow-up question for everyone (with no right answer):

Of all of your resources (time, knowledge, attention, focus, energy,
passion,...), what would you say is the "split" between application
development and infrastructure building/maintenance?

For me: 90% app dev, 10% infrastructure. I didn't realize people spent so much
resource on the latter.

