How We Went From 1M To 100M Users In 6 Months | Hacker News Reader

How We Went From 1M To 100M Users In 6 Months

blog.crossrider.com

33 pointsvalceder27 comments

This reminds me of all of those times that people would tell you that their websites get 100k+ hits per day.

Um.. no you don't, you have 100,000 requests to your servers per day. Each page request generates a subsequent 248 requests for assets. You actually get 403 requests per day.

O wait, what's that? You are including "spiders" and other web crawlers in this statistic? What happens if you filter these out?..

100 unique visitors per day! Nice! (So you only just tried to mislead me by a factor of 1000.)

Some people need to learn how to report MAU/DAU/uniques/views/impressions.

These all mean different things.

To say you have grown 1M to 100M users is really disingenuous and a maniuplative use of ambiguity...

xSwag made an interesting but auto-killed comment that implies most of these installs are from malware. Is there truth to that?

> Oh wow that is really hilarious. The majority of application downloads from your network are worms, specifically the lilyjade worm (browser extension), which, once installed, spams peoples facebook to exploit pages where the extension is again installed and used for click-fraud. Funny how it takes your team over two months for application takedowns. You're more than aware that a vast majority of you're users are from lilyjade variants. Now you're taking credit for malware downloads. Those aren't 100M users, they're 100M downloads. Stop hyping yourself up. Further reading if anybody is interested:

> [1] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/05/facebook-takes-aim-at-cro... [2] http://www.exposedbotnets.com/2012/05/facebook-lily-systemma...

For some I can only see my comment when I'm logged in. Is it because it got flagged or something?

Also: *your

If it was auto-killed, it's for something you did in the past. It will only be visible to users that are logged in with "showdead" enabled and you (presumably to make spammers and trolls think their comments are visible). But I can see this comment so maybe someone didn't like the other one and flagged it.

It's not for something he did in the past or this comment you're replying to would be dead as well. He's not hellbanned. It was probably just a duplicate form submission. When you double submit the comment form, the second copy of the comment is automatically killed, but on the poster's screen it looks like both comments are there. You delete the first one instead of the second, and you end up in this situation, with one [dead] copy of your comment.

@xSwag, I wanted to let you know about the [dead] comment directly, but couldn't find a way to contact you here or anywhere else you might use the same username. There's no e-mail/twitter/etc in your profile.

I was using nightly firefox build so that is probably why it submitted twice. I have updated my profile with my e-mail now. Thanks!

Where did you get the count data?

The CEO of LilyKade claims 30M installs, though that information may be outdated: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dru-mundorff/16/556/560

get on google and type X -> top suggested result Y:

CrossRider a -> "CrossRider adware"; CrossRider d -> "CrossRider delete"; CrossRider m -> "CrossRider malware"; CrossRider r -> "CrossRider removal"; CrossRider s -> "CrossRider spyware"; CrossRider u -> "CrossRider uninstall"; CrossRider v -> "CrossRider virus"; CrossRider w -> "CrossRider web apps virus"

Keyword summary: adware, delete, malware, removal, spyware, uninstall, virus, web apps virus

Isn't it disingenuous to say you have 100M users? That's like Apple saying they have 25 billion iPhone (SDK) users because people have downloaded that many apps. (Note: world population still ~7 billion.)

Extremely disingenuous. In fact it's a lot closer to flat out lying. The extension creators have 100 million users, not them.

They have 7,000 users (developers). They're basically taking credit for all of the work done on all of the extensions and claiming all of the users accordingly

The worst part is, they could have said that they had 7k developers who in turn have 100m users, and we'd still be impressed. Instead they just smeared egg all over their own faces.

We were one of the early Crossrider adopters and they've been consistently great and above board in terms of support and improving the product.

The majority of our users (Sales People) have never even heard of installing a browser extension so I'm not terribly surprised to hear about the crazy Google "Crossrider Uninstall" options.

This probably also isn't helped by inconsistent branding between the extension name 'by Crossrider', on Windows the browser helper is called 'crossrider.exe', etc. which the users won't be familiar with as they likely haven't even visited Crossriders site.

One last note as to the 'inflated' numbers for Crossrider, they actually directly serve up and push updates from their servers so they're more connected to the users than just having a download. It might make more sense if they had said: "Supporting 100M users for X Customers" or something.

Thanks for the positive feedback Michael. We definitely view our framework as one created by developers for developers and are happy to power so many awesome extensions.

Developers always faced the annoying decision of choosing a certain browser and losing a huge chunk of other browser-users, or maintaining several branches of code that is supposed to do the same thing. Well done & Congrats!

Thanks amrif, that's exactly what our aim is, to let developers get the most out of their extensions on ever browser.

As an extension author, one problem with using Crossrider is that you lose control over the code that is being distributed to users.

At least that's my understanding from reading about Crossrider on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/inkl0/crossrider...) where they alleged, for example, that Crossrider extensions changed users' default search engine.

I think this proves quite the opposite. As a developer, you can decide if you want to change your users' default search engine (which will probably annoy them a lot), or do anything you want. It's a platform.

The fact that Crossrider provides APIs for doing things like that is okay.

My general (perhaps theoretical) concern is that Crossrider is putting themselves in a powerful position by having their software running on 100 million peoples' machines (likely less since some people have installed multiple Crossrider extensions). If Crossrider decided to go evil and start monetizing those extensions, as an extension author I would likely get the blame since the user installed my software and not Crossrider.

A lot of this likely depends on what their business model is. For example, is Crossrider spying on users' browsing experience and monetizing that data? If not, do they have the right to do that in the future?

Growing from 0 to 1M users is probably harder than from 1M to 100M.

It really depends on the market size. If you have 1M users which are 40% of the market, it's often difficult. (and expanding in a larger market often implies risks similar to a regular startup).

But if you are in a 1 billion market, your growth rate is impressive and you make data-driven decisions to manage your future growth, then yes, 0 to 1M was harder.

Warren Buffett has a quote for this: "Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill". Even if you find wet snow, it's important to look how long the hill really is.

Larry Page uses the toothbrush test: he wants to invest in products that people would use like a toothbrush, twice each day.

Awesome story, going to try out your platform.

Thanks benjlang!

Very cool idea. Excited about the possibilities here!

Wish there was more meat to this post though...nothing but the wireframe of what you did to get there.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the idea of the Crossrider framework. To find out more about us take a look at our website: www.crossrider.com

Thanks – I appreciate the note.

Our team did check it out and toss it into our bag of tricks. It looks like a very cool idea that would be fun to build with.

Congrats again on the success.

Internet Explorer = Retarded Kid in a Helmet.

Would it be acceptable to depict IE as a ditzy girl, a pigeon-chested homosexual, or a black student with a failing report card? No.

But for some reason, the image a glue-eating retard is fair game. Why?

(FWIW the helmet should signify autistic, not retarded, because because autistic children are the ones that tend to be self-injurious. And autistics' IQs are all over the place. But I don't think that cartoon is trying to say that Internet Explorer has trouble relating to people because it processes information very differently from the rest of us.)

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