Ask 37signals: Numbers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask 37signals: Numbers?

37signals.com

28 pointsluccastera12 comments

I have 3-4 accounts with them, only 1 active. I'm sure there are other people who have multiple inactive accounts.

EDIT:

I don't mean to dis-credit them. They have a steady income from those who like to use their web-apps. They are also becoming the "role-model" for small web-dev shops.

every free webapp has inactive/fake accounts. do you think myspace has 100M+ active users? i have a friendster account that's been collecting dust since 2003.

MySpace posted unique users registered, traffics, pageviews etc. So out of those 100M+ users, I'm sure they have higher rate of active users.

The other thing to consider is the limitation of 37signals product might raise the number of users. For example: you can only have 1 project in Basecamp. A solution for this would be to create another account.

That restriction is only for the free version.

Excuse me for not pointing out the limitation is there for "free account". Either way my point stands still. There are people who don't want to pay for their service thus they chose this way. Once they're done with the project, they just don't bother login-in anymore. Kinda one-off situation.

Stupid follow-up question for everyone (with no right answer):

Of all of your resources (time, knowledge, attention, focus, energy, passion,...), what would you say is the "split" between application development and infrastructure building/maintenance?

For me: 90% app dev, 10% infrastructure. I didn't realize people spent so much resource on the latter.

But Rails doesn't scale!

I'm curious to see some hacker discussion on this, though I can't think of anything to contribute myself...

Me too. The numbers look good. I presume they must be nicely profitable for those numbers. Unless the hardware and energy costs are too high (rails is a bit power hungry).

I wonder why they took on investment from Jeff Bezos - maybe it really it just to have involvement of Jeff Bezos (which would be entirely sensible) not to do with money.

Good on them I say.

It's probably not about the money.

Nice numbers that they have there, much more than I expected.

They have 4.5 messages and 6.5 to-do items per basecamp user account. That suggests to me that the number of active users is 10 or 20 times lower (100000 to 200000 users). Even if only 20% of those are paying, that's enough to be very profitable.

Given these numbers, I'd estimate that they'd serve 3-15 billion pages per year. With 100 CPUs, that's 1-5 requests per second per CPU. Of course, what matters is peak usage, not average.

From my personal (not very broad) experience and from talking to people who ran/developed free websites with accounts, a typical ratio of total accounts vs active accounts is 10:1, perhaps 10:3 if you are really good. On top of that (depends on the service) you may have a significant percentage of active accounts that represent the same user, but 10% of active accounts seems like a safe bet.

TB uploaded/downloaded numbers are really useless, they just thrown them in to look more impressive I suppose.

This means they probably have 20-40K of real active BaseCamp users.

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