Updated: A long time ago, someone wrote a book with the title “The First 20 Million Is The Hardest.” Of course, the book’s title was all about the first 20 million dollars, a lot of money in the quaint old days of Silicon Valley. I suppose you can extend the analogy and say the same about getting the first million users for a service. Once you get those, the rest is gravvy. (And to think that there was a time when 100,000 was a good enough target to achieve.)
Testimony for that comes from Foursquare, which has now passed four million users, according to co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley. In a conversation earlier today, Dennis said that it took a mere 50 days for them to grab a million additional users. The location-based service hit the 3 million mark in August 2010. It’s clear that Foursquare is starting to see a network effect — the more people sign-up, the faster it grows.
Foursquare hit the one million user mark in March 2010, a year after the service launched. The company has been making feature additions to the service that allow it to attract a more mainstream audience, and in an interview earlier this year, Dennis shared with me his grand ambitions of marrying the social web and location. Getting to 4 Million users is only part of that grand scheme.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
“It’s clear that Foursquare is starting to see a network effect — the more people sign-up, the more I hate it.”
FIXED.
OM – who cares?
And the saying is the first 20 million is hardest!
http://www.amazon.com/First-20-Million-Always-Hardest/dp/0380816245
Good catch. i fixed that title.
WOW 4M users, graet.
It’s been fun to watch these guys grow. They’re definitely starting to attract more of a mainstream audience. I can see it in more of my non-tech friends using it.
And… having more friends on it has definitely made it more useful. There’s more of a chance that I’ll see a friend in my neighborhood.
But… there’s still a long ways to go. I’d venture to say that the majority of my friends think that I’m crazy for using Foursquare. Granted that’ll change over time.
Eventful hits 16 million users. Why no coverage of that?
I used Foursquare for a month and then just let it die although I suspect my account is still active. It’s just so utterly, utterly pointless.
Honestly, other than being told I can get a cheap Pizza or Coffee nearby – which Yell tells me anyway – or where my friends are – which texts do better – it does nothing of any value at all.
Staggeringly pointless. Even more so than Twitter.
It is a nice milestone, but I’m interested in how many users are active. I also wonder how many days/weeks people give the service before they stay or leave.
This is just like all those other sites with lots of users that have a high registration count vs active user count. I imagine that a lot of people activate an account, play with the service and then leave their accounts alone never to use the them again. What this usually means is that marketing is good at funneling users to their product via their respective channels, but it’s ultimately not a sticky product.
A more interesting number would be a peak concurrent users.
” . . . the service that allow it to attract …”
What no pronoun! I’ll forgive the “s” if you tell me what the company does. Further, because there is no URL to the company website, I now have to type it in manually.
Being one of the 4 million “users” – that means I downloaded the app. Looked at it. Never checked in once. Never opened it again. So, I know there aren’t 4M “users,” though there may be 4M “registrations.”
How many “active users” not “registrations” is a meaningful number.
Otherwise, yet again, GigaOM is becoming a press release reprint factory. Please get back to your old selves and question a few things. Dig a little deeper, provide some insight. Drop being enamored with flavor-of-the-day. k?