
How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People - pointnova
http://firstround.com/review/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/
======
eliben
I'm one of the first paying customers of Pocket.

Alas, their quality has been going down recently. The most important feature -
keeping the location _inside_ an article between app invocations, is not
working. For long articles, if I stop in the middle and want to resume later,
there's a 80% chance that Pocket will happily set me right in the beginning.

Besides, their rendering for articles with code sucks, so I almost always use
"web view", a decision Pocket also forgets every other time.

So I end up using Pocket as a convenient keyboard-shortcut to save articles,
but on my phone actually open them into Chrome, which has no problem
remembering the location in a tab.

~~~
dombili
Instapaper is annoyingly great at remembering where you left off in an
article. I was a Pocket user too (though not a paid one) but I switched to
Instapaper because I felt like Pocket was losing focus. I'm a happy paid
Instapaper user now.

~~~
eliben
What do you mean by annoyingly great?

~~~
xeromal
Not OP but maybe you want to restart from the beginning at times because
you've forgotten what you had read.

~~~
dombili
Yep, that's what I meant. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word annoying as
there's no way for the app to know that and it's simply working as intended.

------
11thEarlOfMar
When I see stats like this, or like the 400MM users/40 devs, that WhatsApp had
at one point, I can't help but think back to, say, 1985. What would it take to
develop and scale a software product to that number of users?

I worked for MultiScope in 1991. We had to order discs and have disc labels
printed, copy the compiler onto the discs, have manuals and boxes printed,
stuff and shrink-wrap the boxes, ship to Ingram Micro for distribution, and
then wait 2-4 weeks for our product to show up on the shelves at Egghead. I
recall 5 developers, and we were ecstatic to ship 4,000 copies of a major new
version.

That gets me thinking in terms of leverage. The leverage that 2015 Internet
technology affords a single developer is a potent economic force.

~~~
johansch
In the 80s/90s software was really expensive though. ARPU was probably
100-500x higher than today.

Late 80s/early 90: the typical software product was shrinkwrapped, cost $500,
sold in the thousands to tens of thousands.

Now: "Free", ad-based in some form. A few dollars per user at most. More
users.

~~~
smeyer
There's still lots of expensive software. In many fields, the leading products
are thousands of dollars a seat. There's just also now a lot of software
that's a few dollars or less per user.

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downandout
I always find it frustrating that these articles get upvoted, yet they rarely
talk about how the company actually grew to X million users - which would be
the only useful thing in this article for nearly all of the people that are
reading it. An article that talks about how to manage things when your startup
magically gains 20M users is useless you happen to be one of the less than 100
people on the planet that have actually had this happen to them.

------
brayton
> "If save-for-later service Pocket had a spirit animal, it’d be the American
> field ant."

We need an ongoing list of startups and their spirit animals. How else will I
know what products to use.

------
tacoman
I'm anti-cloud. e.g. I run my own mail server and do web hosting for fun. I
have a poster of Snowden in my office.

But I signed up for Pocket because it does two things very well. It lets me
send things to my Kobo e-reader via email and gets around pay-walled content.
I don't recall ever seeing ads either.

I don't pay for the service because I don't need the for-pay features, but
would in fact pay for the basic service if it wasn't free. I wouldn't even
mind if they in turn payed NYT, New Yorker, etc for the content I'm getting.

~~~
jcoder
Did they ever start using HTTPS? When I tried it a while back, it was HTTP-
only.

------
someear
Great read but not a fan of the headline. The underlying concept is good -
growth and headcount dont always need to scale together, user count is too
relative to the industry, company, or product. In some cases, scaling to 1000
users would be a bigger feat than scaling to 20m users.

------
throwccc1
I think I remember in the early days there being pushback from content
providers about not getting clickthroughs, ad impressions. What's the status
of this type of service re: copyright? Neither Pocket nor users have any right
to transform / create derivative works -- is there some loophole here about
personal use and not re-distributing?

Is it a copyright violation to make a cross-stitch version of a tweet for your
living room? To provide a meme generator service that uses NYT headlines?

~~~
matthewmcg
"Neither Pocket nor users have any right to transform / create derivative
works "

Here in the U.S. this kind of copying by end users is probably fair use, which
is a defense to copyright infringement. There is a line of cases that
authorize home recording of video broadcasts. I think the reasoning upholding
this "time shifting" or "format shifting" would also apply to a read it later
service.

It is very unlikely that a publisher would ever try to sue an individual
reader for using one of these services. It is more likely they would try to
shut down the service itself by claiming that the service induces or is liable
for contributing to the end-users' copyright infringement. But these claims
would fail if what the users are doing is fair use.

The weakness of the U.S.-style fair use concept is that it is a case-by-case
determination based on several vague factors. Getting a legal case to the
point where this determination is actually made is very expensive, so we don't
have much precedent to rely on for new kinds of activities. And what precedent
we do have is not always easily extended to new activities or technologies.

There's a nice overview of fair use here if you're curious:
[http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-
fair-u...](http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/)

------
rw2
Curious to hear if this is actually a significant stat. It seems simple to run
a app company with only 3-4 technology person if you have a scalable technical
structure.

With a customer facing transaction based service like Uber this would be hard.
But pocket is pretty straightforward.

~~~
hermanradtke
They also had some really bad security holes recently exposed too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078967)
so they really didn't have this covered with 20 people.

~~~
segmondy
What's your point? There are companies with thousands of engineers with pretty
bad security holes too. They did it with 20 people, get over it.

~~~
hueving
It means the quality isn't great for the limited amount of functionality it
provides. That doesn't count as 'they did it' in security-sensitive groups.

~~~
merb
The problem mostly can come from your tooling. I mean lots of people use and
used MessageDigest.isEqual in Java however that class had a huge issue in Java
6 until Java 6 - 17 which could attackers use time attacks against your
authentication scheme.

Also it's not really easy to prevent against such security things with small
teams if you can't rely on the tooling inside your language. Building Crypto
things is really hard. So People needing to rely on. Today I've rewritten a
authentication / authorization layer for one of our internal Apps, now the App
is hardended against csrf, timing attacks and many more things. The only
things that I used was the internal PBKDF2HmacSha256 for Passwords of Java
Sha256Pnrg for Salts and I copied behaviors of the Auth0 JWT Library (i just
used another json implementation which the app already had) and i have
something like 200 Lines of Code. It's secure as long as MessageDigest and the
PBKDF2 Code of Java is secure and that's something people can't avoid.
Especially in small teams.

------
hathym
The real question is; how much they are making?

~~~
jermo
There are ways to estimate revenues [https://saastr.quora.com/How-to-Figure-
Out-Your-Competitors%...](https://saastr.quora.com/How-to-Figure-Out-Your-
Competitors%E2%80%99-Revenues-in-About-70-Seconds)

------
rocky1138
I loved the Pocket Chrome extension and used it every day. Once they changed
it to one that required cross-domain cookies, I uninstalled it and only used
Pocket once or twice as a result. Unfortunate!

~~~
tomfitz
"Save to Pocket (mini)", an unofficial extension, can only "Read and change
data on getpocket.com" [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-
pocket-min...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-pocket-
mini/calnfcidhlhdmmmnicdpddbmmjmfohem)

~~~
rocky1138
Wow! Thank you!

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hokkos
The new Firefox pocket extension is pure shit, I still use the old one. Please
maintain it, not the one forced on users.

~~~
misterjinx
They announced [1] back in June that the old extension will not be actively
developed, and recommend everyone to move over to the new one.

[1] [https://getpocket.com/blog/2015/06/pocket-is-now-built-
into-...](https://getpocket.com/blog/2015/06/pocket-is-now-built-into-
firefox/)

------
sancha_
How many of those users were forced by updating Firefox?

~~~
JohnTHaller
Zero. Because, once again, the open source Pocket code contained within
Firefox is only ever activated if you specifically choose to use it. It's not
even loaded due to lazy loading.

~~~
hueving
So you're saying there is no new button that shows up? Claiming that zero
users moved to pocket because of the automatic integration, then you're being
delusional. It amounts to an endorsement from Firefox at the lease and the
assumption that it's not a different company for inexperienced people.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Please see the parent comment again:

> How many of those users were forced by updating Firefox?

"forced" would be zero

~~~
lqdc13
Sure, but if you make a visible button on the second most popular browser that
links to your product, you would get a lot of users and some of them would
sign up for the paid service.

I bet the number of users would be much smaller if there was no such button.

~~~
Killswitch
Yeah, of course the numbers would be smaller if there was no such button,
nobody is saying otherwise. They're just stating that nobody was forced to use
Pocket after the integration.

How hard is that to understand?

> Force [verb]: make (someone) do something against their will.

~~~
lqdc13
I'm not saying anyone was forced either. I was just saying the numbers aren't
that surprising.

------
jkbr
I love Pocket. I'm a paying customer. But… I'm also super annoyed by its bugs
and will be happy to switch to a payed alternative, that:

1\. has a decent HTML parser that doesn't omit images from articles all the
bloody time

2\. implements a proper state restoration mechanism for its iOS app. It's
exhausting having to scroll through my entire article list trying to find the
one I was reading (and then finding the original position) every time I switch
to Safari to look something up and then back

3\. has a highlights & notes feature as a bonus

Please?

~~~
bthdonohue
I work at Instapaper, which competes with Pocket. We have #2 and #3, #1 is a
difficult problem and we face the same challenges as Pocket and others.

~~~
achompas
I use Instapaper, and switched from Pocket way back when for these exact
reasons (highlights and saving my position). They're implemented wonderfully.

------
aresant
Just a random note - [https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/) lists
17,000,000 users on their badge @ the bottom, last update I found was in April
@ 12m (1), and this article highlights 20m

Back in the day when we built the Trapster.com website (prior to the Nokia
team takeover) we a/b tested a static user # that we updated monthly vs. a #
that changed and was specific to usage / etc.

We found that the specific was a significant conversion driver and we executed
several tests to get that message closer to the top (2).

Of course this was also back in the day where consumers looked on desktops for
the app to download vs. the modern trained user that looks on app store.

But maybe something to consider moving up the page and building a script to
execute more frequently.

(1)
[http://web.archive.org/web/20150325061108/https://getpocket....](http://web.archive.org/web/20150325061108/https://getpocket.com/)

(2)
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130812132821/http://www.trapste...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130812132821/http://www.trapster.com/)

~~~
kordless
The Bandwagon Bias is powerful.

------
anotherevan
Is it just me, or was that article more fluff than anything else?

I have a Kobo ereader and so use Pocket for saving articles that I want to
read later, away from the computer. Have found it works very well for this.
(That said, if my ereader integrated Instapaper or Readability I’d probably be
just as happy.)

My one complaint is that every now and again it finds an article it cannot
extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader,
and there’s no obvious indication that there is a problem.

To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application
that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I’ve
read an article I archive it. Then when I’m back at my computer I run my app,
which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me
manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to
follow up and read the HN discussions after I’ve found the time to read the
article.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

------
dovereconomics
For their size,its funding history is even more impressive:

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pocket](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pocket)

------
untog
It's interesting - the article mentions them having a lot of projects on the
docket, but doesn't go into detail on most of them. I use Pocket every day and
a few bugs notwithstanding, I'm very happy with it. In a weird way, them
having that many projects _worries_ me because it means it might bloat
outwards from what it is today.

------
Killswitch
Very good article, makes me feel better being a sole employee of a SaaS.

------
favadi
Can someone tell me what it offers over Evernote Web Clipper?

~~~
r3bl
It's like Evernote's Cleary bundled with browser bookmarks. You save an
article with one click, retrieve an article by visiting their website and read
it in reading view similar to Cleary's.

As for the Web Clipper, I don't think that there's any similarity.

------
omouse
Shame it isn't free/open source.

~~~
josu
It is free and some of its code is open source:
[https://github.com/Pocket](https://github.com/Pocket)

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nahtnam
I saved this article to my pocket to read later....

