Comments on: Web 2.0: The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant

By: fiwedding

fiwedding — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:12:09 +0000

It's a difficult thing to listen to feedback from your initial users, the first 25,000, and do the opposite of what they recommend. You alienate your "support base" etc etc. Tough situation.

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[...] After a concept is proven, then a solid dev team with solid tech leadership brings in their expertise to see if the idea can be built into something sustainable. As a sidebar, please take a read of Brad Feld’s very awesome post from a few years ago “The first 25,000 Users are Irrelevant“. [...]

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By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 21 May 2006 14:28:28 +0000

I’m intrigued like Dharmesh is. What are “the 2 questions”?

By: Chris Saad

Chris Saad — Tue, 16 May 2006 04:22:32 +0000

Great Article! Manual Trackback: http://www.touchstonegadget.com/blog/2006/05/audience-of-53651.html

By: Andy Brudtkuhl

Andy Brudtkuhl — Mon, 15 May 2006 23:09:15 +0000

Viral marketing is a great way to generate buzz, but as you’ve noted said buzz does not create a sustainable model.

What helps you create a sustainable model? Interaction with your first 25,000 users. I think the first 25,000 users are the most relevant because they will help you to create value in your product. Not only do they help you realize how your product is best used, they help you realize essential features that you are missing.

Now, when you get to user 100,000 you know what your users want and you didn’t have to experiment on the masses.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Mon, 15 May 2006 20:41:54 +0000

John – excellent comment that helps prove my point.

There are actually two interesting FeedBurner “subscriber” numbers. The 53,651 number is the daily unique “subscribers” that pool the feed. However, as you point out, you are counted numerous times since you’ve subscribed to Techcrunch in multiple feed readers. As a result, FeedBurner recently rolled out a new metric called “Reach” which is the number of people that actually look at the post in a feedreader in a 24 hour period. While reach is probably a little overstated (since lots of people will “skim articles” but not actually read them, it’s still a much more accurate view of daily readership.

For example, on Sunday, FeedBurner tells me I had 5,402 subscribers and a reach of 1,421. I don’t look at this ratio daily, but a 4:1 / 5:1 ratio seems about average.

By: johnr

johnr — Mon, 15 May 2006 20:25:48 +0000

53,651…Is this # even accurate? I admit I don’t know how feedburner comes up with this number but if it is just the number of RSS readers that subscribe to the feed URL than I’d guess it is well overvalued. I have tried probably 5 or 6 different RSS readers over the past two years (due in part to TechCrunch’s reviews of RSS readers). So if Arrington’s feed is in each of my newgator/rojo/bloglines/myyahoo/newsalloy/sage feed readers, doesn’t that mean I’m subscribed to TechCrunch 6 times? I’m guessing that many of his subscribers have tried out more than one feed reader, effectively subscribing more than once and inflating that number significantly.

Brad, as an investor in both feedburner and newsgator you would know more than me here…am I way off on this assumption?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 15 May 2006 18:22:53 +0000

The fundamental point is this. Successful sites will do whatever it takes to appear less successful. They block alexa. They keep off the web 2.0 radar. To appear on techcrunch would be a disaster to a company trying to fly under the radar. That’s why a higher proportion of techcrunch companies will not survive, compared to the sum of all sites being launched.