> my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its first day in the wild. Kevin guessed 2,500, and in an especially optimistic moment, I went big and guessed 25,000. The next day, the realist in me couldn’t believe I had hit it on the nose.
That seems outrageous and amazing. Systrom had only ever worked at Google and then Nextstop, how could he have possibly had a network that large that early on to get that many people to download it?
How can someone reading this possibly think they can get 25,000 people to download their app on day 1? I feel like I'm missing something here.
Barring some strong marketing leading up to launch, that's not realistic, which is the point of the quote. Instagram's first day performance was in the "so good you'd sound like a joke for suggesting it was possible" territory.
With that said, actual viral growth is absurdly fast. I didn't really have an understanding of it until one of my tweets got picked up during the Ferguson riots, and the speed is just staggering. It increments faster than you can reload the page. Hundreds of people per second. 25k in a day is totally doable under those circumstances. It's one of those things you can read about, but have to see to really internalize.
That seems outrageous and amazing. Systrom had only ever worked at Google and then Nextstop, how could he have possibly had a network that large that early on to get that many people to download it?
How can someone reading this possibly think they can get 25,000 people to download their app on day 1? I feel like I'm missing something here.