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When you were at $4M-$6M in revenue, but not growing, what was your retention like? Were you adding new users but churning out so many that growth was flat? O
by robhunter 8y ago
When you were at $4M-$6M in revenue, but not growing, what was your retention like?
Were you adding new users but churning out so many that growth was flat?
Or were you not adding new users, but retaining the ones you already had?
- timr 8y agoI was at JTV during this time. We were basically churning. There was certainly a significant cohort of regular viewers, but much of our traffic owed to spikes of viewers who would come for specific content, then bounce. They didn't care about us, so long as we had the thing they wanted to see. We spent a lot of time debating whether or not this was just the nature of "live" content (e.g. live television derives most of its value from sports and real-time events, and they defend these verticals viciously). I have no special information on Twitch, but from the outside, it is a qualitatively different audience. There's a level of commitment that just wasn't there for JTV. The lesson is burned into my mind, because there are a lot of ways for a startup to generate deceptive "traction", and if you're not careful you can fool even yourself. You have to be brutally honest about how committed your users are, and what their actual value is. It's an easy way to become a zombie startup -- trundling along, nursing a "big" audience of users who require a lot of care and attention, but don't really care about your product in return. These kinds of audiences are worse than worthless, because they waste your time.
- mwseibel 8y agoPerfect description of JTV