We’re living in interesting times. If your service doesn’t reach a billion users in 4 hours, then you’re screwed. Or so they say.
What ticked my nerve this time was a report on The Next Web a few months ago about a mobile calling app Line. Need the exact headline? “Faster to 20 million than Facebook”.
How easy can that be?
Line took 8 months to reach 20 million users where Facebook took 28 months. While this sound impressive and I am sure it is, there is a broader picture to look at:
- Draw Something took 50 days to reach 50 million downloads. It took them 5 weeks to get to 20 million…
- Viber took 3 months to reach 10 million users.
Viber is still growing, now with 90 million users, but has nothing to show on the side of profit. With no apparent business plan to work with, the only thing that can happen here is an acquisition.
Draw Something is now something of the past – at least in uptake and usage. They made money while they were at it – and they still do – but not as much as Zynga was hoping for.
Here’s an infographic that shows just how fast some companies and services reach 50 million users:
Notice a few others there that got “faster than Facebook” to 50 million?
While it is still hard to get those thousands and then millions of users to use your service, this isn’t a good enough indication of success anymore; especially not in VoIP I am afraid.
We are accelerating faster than ever – each new service rises up quickly, but can fall just as fast. The question moving forward will be which ones have a stickiness aspect to it, and how, if at all can they monetize on their users base.