Twilio's User Growth Over Time
milesgrimshaw.com
milesgrimshaw.com
I guarantee the company KPI here is acquired users / month, not total users. Look closely: January 2013 was probably a kind of scary month. October 2012 was awesome ... and they didn't repeat it until 2 years later.
This is great for investors and the public, but you can't drive with this graph.
If you are interested in making this a series, use robust data, or don't do it at all.
Additionally, an area chart is the incorrect type of chart for this kind of graph, since the area under the curve does not represent the total number of users. (You'd use an area chart of the y-axis is number of new users.) A line chart would be more accurate.
What data would you propose using for a private company like this? There is very little public data and this is the only KPI that is consistently reported. Something is at least a little better than nothing to understand how a business has grown over time.
In this case, "grown" is a loaded question from your metric data, since "number of developers" does not distinguish between the number of developers who have joined and who have left; it's only the total, but the former metric is what's important.