

Twilio's User Growth Over Time - milesgrimshaw
http://milesgrimshaw.com/hockeystick-twilio/

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trjordan
Ugh, I hate these graphs. Cumulative graphs make even moderate or bumpy growth
look predictable.

I guarantee the company KPI here is acquired users / month, not total users.
Look closely: January 2013 was probably a kind of scary month. October 2012
was awesome ... and they didn't repeat it until 2 years later.

This is great for investors and the public, but you can't drive with this
graph.

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minimaxir
The chart is a cumulative chart to hide the fact that the source data is _only
eight data points_ from various blogs. That's very sleazy and borderline
misleading because it creates an extrapolation as mentioned in the comment
above.

If you are interested in making this a series, use robust data, or don't do it
at all.

Additionally, an area chart is the incorrect type of chart for this kind of
graph, since the area under the curve does not represent the total number of
users. (You'd use an area chart of the y-axis is number of new users.) A line
chart would be more accurate.

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milesgrimshaw
Great point on an area graph being misleading - changed.

What data would you propose using for a private company like this? There is
very little public data and this is the only KPI that is consistently
reported. Something is at least a little better than nothing to understand how
a business has grown over time.

~~~
minimaxir
This was one of the primary reasons I stopped doing analysis on startup metric
data. Most of it is deliberately incomplete and it would be dishonest to do
analysis on incomplete data.

In this case, "grown" is a loaded question from your metric data, since
"number of developers" does not distinguish between the number of developers
who have joined and who have left; it's only the total, but the former metric
is what's important.

