Josh Kopelman’s post on “the first 53,651 users” has been getting a lot of comment. A VC with First Round Capital, Josh talks about all the Digg.com clones and Flickr knockoffs he sees, and suggests that startups shouldn’t pay much attention to their first 50,000 or so users — since that’s about how many RSS subscribers TechCrunch.com has. In other words, don’t believe that all those thousands of geeks signing up for things represents a real stab at mainstream success.
This is a great point, as my friend Paul Kedrosky and others, including VC Brad Feld, have noted. Most of the 50,000 people are probably just like me — they sign up for everything that comes along (as though there were a giant score sheet somewhere recording how many “invite-only” betas we have all managed to get access to) — use it maybe once or twice and then in most cases completely forget about it.
That’s not a great indicator of whether a company has a sustainable business model, I grant you. And it’s also not surprising that most people’s grandmothers, or aunts, or the guys down at the hardware store haven’t heard about Digg.com or even Craigslist.org. Does that mean they aren’t good businesses, albeit in a very early startup stage? I’m not so sure about that. Flickr started that way, and has reached a point where I would argue it’s a darn good business, and I think Thomas Hawk is right that there’s more to it than just “don’t pay any attention to the first 50,000 geeks.”
Not all that long ago, most people probably thought Google was just some geeky website with a stupid name, and I was likely one of the 50,000 or so who started using it early on because it was better — qualitatively better — than everything else. Obviously, every Digg.com clone isn’t going to become Google, but that doesn’t mean those 50,000 early-adopter geeks won’t turn out to be right.