The 2009 TechCrunch Web App Survey Results | Hacker News Reader

The 2009 TechCrunch Web App Survey Results

webappsurvey2009.techcrunch.com

23 pointssant0sk120 comments

Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but I wonder if 66 is an adequate sample size when respondants are self-selected (as opposed to random).

(66 respondants can be deduced by finding the highest common denominator in all the response percentages. In this case the HCD is 1.51515. So 100/1.51515 = 66.)

Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but no sample size is adequate when the respondents are self-selected :)

The last few charts are the most telling. The majority of free sites reported $1-$5 in monthly revenue but the majority of subscription sites reported $1000-$5000 a month.

Where's the option for subscription sites making < $1000 a month?

I was wondering about that too. Perhaps they all made more than $1000 a month ?

I couldn't find out how many startups they surveyed, so it might as well be only 3 startups.

Is that revenue per user, or overall? My barely-maintained blog makes more than $5 a month in revenue. Maybe some are having a low or no ad site to start out?

It would be awesome if they released the data in some form, the interesting questions would be.. how successful are bootstrapped vs. funded? How successful are multi-founder vs. single-founder. How do these number change when you look at founding date, etc.

I always hate when I see good data put into charts that basically tells you the least interesting part of the story.

It would be interesting, they should derive that data from Crunchbase.

It seems sloppily done:

The total number of participants is not stated.

What's with the overlapping or gapping ranges?

  The full-time categories all list 0, and 0-1, yet omit 2-4.

  Many range end-points are included in two ranges.

"If you raised money, house [sic] much did you raise..." (#14)

etc.

Looks like they made a mistake on the intervals in #14. 20,000- 100,000 then 10,000 to 500,0000 and then over 50,000?

Its really hard to decipher this data. Is there a list of companies that responded? That would help.

There are also a few really bad typos (http://skitch.com/bradgessler/nbqen/re-the-2009-techcrunch-w...)

Gotta call bullshit on this one: Percentage of active users on your free plan

Only 6% of sites have >50% of active users on their free plan? So, 94% of freemium web apps have >50% conversion rates, and 43% have >99% conversion? Guess that means I'm really, really bad at converting free -> paid.

It kind of makes sense when inverted, but that's a really bad typo.

Very difficult to believe (even rationalizing a success bias) that 60% are generating $1,000-$10,000 when 55% have costs of less than $1,000.

Looks like a really small sample size, about half of which are bootstrapped startups with zero users. I'm not sure how useful this data is.

Interesting how little funding the participants received: Only 18% of were funded (#13), and 25% of those received less than $5k (#14).

I hate pie charts.

Amen. Especially 3D pie charts.

And compression artifacts. They used JPEG instead of PNG :\

It's the correlations that would be interesting here - how does marketing cost per user relate to revenue per user? How do monthly costs relate to number of active users? Etc. Or even if we could see all these same pie charts, but filtered to (eg) companies with between 20 and 50k in monthly revenue...

If you raised money, what percentage of the company do the founders still own?

That's pretty depressing that more than 1 in 10 of the responding founders said they owned less than 20% of their companies.

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