

30/10/10 - tilt
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/07/301010.html

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bfe
This is a great example of Fred sharing valuable info he gleans from his
unique perspective as a VC who has managed to collect a lot of great Web
portfolio companies.

At the same time, the super eagerness he mentions here for companies to email
people, and how AWESOME that is, is different for some of us users. I can't
tell you how bitterly my opinion has turned against a lot of companies I've
thought were cool and whose service I thought I'd enjoy and who I entrusted
with my top level personal gmail, the one that notifies me on my android just
like my work email, and who I trusted to email me JUDICIOUSLY, who have ended
up sending me batshit-insane quantities of email and made me very quickly hate
them and the next seven generations of their prodigy forever and ever.

~~~
fredwilson
i'm not talking about unwanted email or unwanted notifications. you can turn
off these emails and mobile notifications in all the major services. i do that
myself. but many people like to get these emails and it does drive engagement

~~~
bfe
Thanks Fred.

I'm sure that is the case for all your companies.

I've just had nightmare experiences with some companies such as, at the worst
extreme, one company who had a marketing person actually email me in response
to several emails I sent begging to opt out of their frequent marketing emails
to say they refused to offer me any way out of continuing to receive marketing
emails, and prompting me to have to engage with upper management to the point
where their management ended up profusely apologizing for the belligerence of
their marketing person and ensuring me that the marketing person was being
dealt with appropriately.

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tednaleid
Am I missing something or shouldn't it be 30/10/1? 30% use it monthly, 10% use
it daily, and 1% is the max number of concurrent users.

In the article the last number is 10%, but it's stated as "the max number of
concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10% of the number of daily
users". Isn't the number of daily users just the previous 10%? Or is that the
number of users that use it within a day (which would get another ~1% from the
30% monthly users plus a little bit more)?

~~~
dgudkov
10% of daily users which in turn are 10% of all users is the same as 1% of all
users. 10% * 10% = 1%.

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diminish
Very impressive real data from Fred Wilson. In my startup it is a bit lower;
25/5/5. and how does it your startup?

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angryasian
I've always been weary on actual usage numbers on mobile applications. The HN
crowd are probably more on the higher end of usage, but I find in general
users only use a few of the well known web apps - mobile versions of their
applications consistently. Approximately 30% of registrations usage of once a
month is not that good. USV's portfolio companies are also some of the biggest
mobile apps available now.

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rmason
I really wish there was a site where these observations were all collected,
common wisdom metrics. It would give us all hard goals to meet or exceed as we
planned our companies. Maybe a wiki where people who wanted to share like Fred
could add to the collected knowledge.

~~~
ma2rten
I know this is not what you meant, but Comscore has quite some data for the
bigger websites.

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code_duck
Pretty much every company inflates their membership statistics. I wonder what
the 30% figure would be if the common practice was to actually try to estimate
how many individuals have signed up for the service, not merely the number of
accounts.

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jtchang
What tools are you guys using to measure this on a web application?

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cyphersanctus
Now that I revise my data, that proportion is quite accurate.

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KevBurnsJr
Yoda concludes bloated these numbers are.

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jsavimbi
> who have ended up sending me batshit-insane quantities of email and made me
> very quickly hate them

agreed, but there are also a lot of lonely people out there who without
constant updates would receive no email at all. That being said, I prefer to
receive notifications only when someone has interacted with a piece of content
that I've shared, or has been shared about me.

