So sick of this vile greedy a-million-X-isn't-cool mentality. This Disqus comment sums it up for me:
"OR you can skip the VC bullshit and build a sustainable business that makes you boatloads of money and generates hundreds of great jobs with a <1 million user base."
Seriously. From the title, I figured it would be something like, "There are sixteen godzillion apps in the various App Stores to compete with, and umpty million app-buying users, so you're likely to only sell X thousand copies, which won't pay for your time, unless you can somehow get ahead of the pack."
Instead, I'm supposed to be depressed that it's hard to go from 1 million users to 10 million? Holy moly. If you're not doing well with a million users, maybe you screwed up.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I think you both took this a way other than that I intended. I think it is an amazing accomplishment to get to 1M users, and generally makes a great business, which I've written about countless times, e.g. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-... and http://ye.gg/fan.
The depressing part has to do with vision. If you have a truly mass-market consumer app and you believe in it and set out to change the world with it, you should not be satisfied with 1M users. After all, the more users you have the more will experience your vision.
It is depressing because what generally got you to 1M, which can happen rather quickly, generally will not work to get you to 10M (http://ye.gg/magnitude). That's why I suggested to double down on engaged users and organic growth because that is the quickest path to realizing the vision.
There's the second half of the question: How much money are you making from your users?
If you're able to effectively monetize a million users, that sounds great. If you're making millicents per user a year, a million users is only a few thousand dollars. And if you haven't figured out monetization, and are just hoping to make an exit, you probably need a larger number of users to catch the attention of BigCorp(r) if you want them to buy you out for a reasonable amount.
The numbers of users that you need to be doing well depends on the product, the market, your goals, and umpteen other factors. If a million users is enough to keep you afloat sustainably, congrats!
> If a million users is enough to keep you afloat sustainably, congrats!
If it's not, perhaps you need to ask yourself why you chose that business model (or lack of business model) to begin with. Startups don't happen to you. You design your startup from day 1.
Take this kind of thing as a warning not to design one you'll certainly fail at.
> If you're not doing well with a million users, maybe you screwed up.
I think his point is that just because a company gets a million users, that doesn't equate to success. It's fallacy to think that just getting there means that you're doing everything right. As you pointed out, acquiring users doesn't make you a business.
Startups are supposed to be about explosive growth. Your startup is a failure if you don't get huge - then you're just a small business. Most people here aren't interested in building a small business they have to take care of for a few decades!
