The quickest path to $50m in revenue? Build fun. | Hacker News Reader

The quickest path to $50m in revenue? Build fun.

nabeelhyatt.com

27 pointsbabyshake13 comments

Doesn't include data on % of companies in each category that fails.

Should it? Isn't that irrelevant to how fast the "best of the best" can get to 50 Mil?

True, but if you want to calculate your own EV over x years, you need that kind of data.

This was starting with the premise of "success" -- let's assume it's a world class idea and hits $50m in revenue, goes public, and becomes one of the top 100 software companies in the world (in terms of capitalization). How long does that kind of amazing success take?

If you're wildest predictions about growth of your startup are off from what the historically most successful companies public today are doing, that's worth looking at.

3 things I noticed (not sure if it affects the conclusions):

1. Interesting that neither article (this or the WSJ post) seems to include data on mobile carriers or handset providers. Not sure why that is.

2. Entertainment seems to be the only category that's primarly B2C companies. Almost seems like it doesn't fit. If you're going to include video game makers, why can't you also include Netflix and other such companies.

3. I wonder how much acquisitions have affected these numbers.

Yeah, the data was just software companies. So no Apple, Nokia. They also didn't have Google or Yahoo, which was unfortunate. Still, in terms of top 100 software companies, it's a valuable sample.

Seems very unlikely to me that parallels can be drawn from the past to the present in that way. Markets go through different phases.

Yep, and did he just draw a general rule from just one example (Activision)?

No:

At least three social gaming companies I know of will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

Hi. Nabeel here. To be clear this should not be thought of as conclusive academic analysis. These were just interesting indicators that I found.

I was using the data that was available from the article linked, which means it's the largest 100 public software companies, then segmented by type. Which meant, any individual category had roughly 5-8 companies with which to sample.

In the entertainment category it was Activision (4 years to $50m), Electronic Arts (6), Take-Two (6), International Game Technology (10) and a few others.

Maybe gaming is timeless, it just seems to me that some fields have a time when they boom, and other times when they don't boom so much. So looking at a company founded during the boom could be misleading.

No ecommerce on the list?

Zynga, Facebook, Myspace.

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