

Ask HN: How many users does your webapp need to be worth something? - dublinclontarf

For a free to use site with advertisements(as the revenue model), roughly how many users would make this site worth anything?
======
patio11
Not enough information to answer the question. It would depend what your
application does, who the users are, what you are advertising and how, what
kind of response you get to your ads, what type of activity users think they
are engaged in, etc.

I think you could make an app with 50 users that is more valuable than
Facebook, if I'm allowed to pick whom the 50 users are and what they do.
(Military officers with purchasing authority who use the app to make trusted
strategic forecasting decisions. BAM.)

~~~
dublinclontarf
Just normal people, it's just a simple app to help people with something they
do quite often.

~~~
patio11
Normal people like poor twentysomething males who are habitually adblind,
value only digital content, and steal all the content that isn't nailed down,
or normal people like forty-something females who make purchasing decisions
related to the website niche for households with $80k+ average incomes, where
goods responsive to the needs of the niche have little branding and 90% plus
profit margins?

~~~
dublinclontarf
Well, anyone who lends stuff to their friends, which is everyone. Normal that
is. I'm not being that helpful.

~~~
patio11
Careful here: I think you'll find that borrowing trades off with buying (i.e.
people who buy don't borrow, people who borrow don't buy). Aside from a few
industries where one does not have to have money to get it extracted from you,
people who don't buy do not make good targets for advertising.

Try chatting up some middle class housewives. I may be totally off my rocker
here, but I'm thinking borrowing items of significance is vastly, vastly more
common among twenty-somethings in communal living situations than it is among
people who own property.

