How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People

http://firstround.com/review/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/

by pointnova • 11 years ago

166 72 11 years ago

rw2• 11 years ago

Curious to hear if this is actually a significant stat. It seems simple to run a app company with only 3-4 technology person if you have a scalable technical structure.

With a customer facing transaction based service like Uber this would be hard. But pocket is pretty straightforward.

hermanradtke• 11 years ago

They also had some really bad security holes recently exposed too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078967 so they really didn't have this covered with 20 people.

segmondy2• 11 years ago

What's your point? There are companies with thousands of engineers with pretty bad security holes too. They did it with 20 people, get over it.

segmondy2• 11 years ago

This is not really news. Whatsapp if I recall had 500 million users with about the same size team. Plentyoffish had and might still better users/engineer ratio too. Stackoverflow as well.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

I think the 'scalable technical structure' is key here; up until some years ago, if your application was growing, you'd need to rent and manage your own servers. Nowadays one dude can just upload his application to Amazon and have it scale automatically with no real hassle. If this was ten years ago, the first hired employee would be a sysadmin.

Nowadays though, as long as you have a good idea and some reasonably basic skills, you can make an app for millions of people.

mc808• 11 years ago

I have good ideas and reasonably basic skills. Nothing I've done has even come close to attracting 1 million users. :/

hathym• 11 years ago

The real question is; how much they are making?

jermo• 11 years ago

There are ways to estimate revenues https://saastr.quora.com/How-to-Figure-Out-Your-Competitors%...

nahtnam• 11 years ago

I saved this article to my pocket to read later....

rocky11382• 11 years ago

I loved the Pocket Chrome extension and used it every day. Once they changed it to one that required cross-domain cookies, I uninstalled it and only used Pocket once or twice as a result. Unfortunate!

tomfitz• 11 years ago

"Save to Pocket (mini)", an unofficial extension, can only "Read and change data on getpocket.com" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-pocket-min...

rocky11382• 11 years ago

Wow! Thank you!

sancha_• 11 years ago

How many of those users were forced by updating Firefox?

JohnTHaller2• 11 years ago

Zero. Because, once again, the open source Pocket code contained within Firefox is only ever activated if you specifically choose to use it. It's not even loaded due to lazy loading.

hueving2• 11 years ago

So you're saying there is no new button that shows up? Claiming that zero users moved to pocket because of the automatic integration, then you're being delusional. It amounts to an endorsement from Firefox at the lease and the assumption that it's not a different company for inexperienced people.

r3bl2• 11 years ago

None. There was a new icon introduced, but nobody was forced to create an account. You can use the reading mode just fine without Pocket.

mintplant2• 11 years ago

In fact, the reading mode is completely unrelated to the Pocket feature, and was introduced separately.

zobzu• 11 years ago

Sometimes im wondering if Chad Weiner's from Firefox is related to Nate Weiner from Pocket ;-)

ilurkedhere• 11 years ago

Super annoying, that.

eliben3• 11 years ago

I'm one of the first paying customers of Pocket.

Alas, their quality has been going down recently. The most important feature - keeping the location inside an article between app invocations, is not working. For long articles, if I stop in the middle and want to resume later, there's a 80% chance that Pocket will happily set me right in the beginning.

Besides, their rendering for articles with code sucks, so I almost always use "web view", a decision Pocket also forgets every other time.

So I end up using Pocket as a convenient keyboard-shortcut to save articles, but on my phone actually open them into Chrome, which has no problem remembering the location in a tab.

kstrauser• 11 years ago

I've had the same experiences and figured that if I was only using it as bookmarking service then I might as well completely migrate to Pinboard (and various supporting apps). I've been happy with my decision.

paulojreis• 11 years ago

Similar impressions here. My e-book reader (Kobo Aura) has a native feature for synchronization with a Pocket account, so I end up using Pocket as a glorified bookmarking (and content fetching) service.

dombili2• 11 years ago

Instapaper is annoyingly great at remembering where you left off in an article. I was a Pocket user too (though not a paid one) but I switched to Instapaper because I felt like Pocket was losing focus. I'm a happy paid Instapaper user now.

eliben3• 11 years ago

What do you mean by annoyingly great?

mintplant2• 11 years ago

I went from Pocket to Instapaper as well. For me, it was because the Pocket web client was getting progressively worse with every update. (Huge floating navbar in a reading view -- seriously? And the UI was dog-slow.)

antjanus• 11 years ago

There's no WP app for Pocket so I use a 3rd-party app called Poki and it's amazing. Has no issue remembering where you stopped on various articles.

eliben3• 11 years ago

Geez, I was trying to figure out what you'd do with a Wordpress app for Pocket, and then it hit me.

csixty4• 11 years ago

Poki is pretty great on a Surface, too. I actually prefer it over the official iOS Pocket app.

colomon• 11 years ago

Geez, I've been using it for some time now and never had a clue it was supposed to save your position in an article. I just use it as a convenient way to transfer links between my devices.

xoail3• 11 years ago

Shameless plug: I made drumroll.io to simply bookmark and/or send links from pc to phone (drumroll.io/app). It does not require authentication and has chrome extension (drumroll.io/chrome) as well.

josu3• 11 years ago

I currently use Pushbullet, are there any reasons why I should switch to drumroll.io?

SonicSoul• 11 years ago

Funny I switched from instapaper to pocket because it was new and shinier. So far I like it more and have not noticed any UX issues. I'll keep an eye out now thanks

untog• 11 years ago

It's interesting - the article mentions them having a lot of projects on the docket, but doesn't go into detail on most of them. I use Pocket every day and a few bugs notwithstanding, I'm very happy with it. In a weird way, them having that many projects worries me because it means it might bloat outwards from what it is today.

11thEarlOfMar• 11 years ago

When I see stats like this, or like the 400MM users/40 devs, that WhatsApp had at one point, I can't help but think back to, say, 1985. What would it take to develop and scale a software product to that number of users?

I worked for MultiScope in 1991. We had to order discs and have disc labels printed, copy the compiler onto the discs, have manuals and boxes printed, stuff and shrink-wrap the boxes, ship to Ingram Micro for distribution, and then wait 2-4 weeks for our product to show up on the shelves at Egghead. I recall 5 developers, and we were ecstatic to ship 4,000 copies of a major new version.

That gets me thinking in terms of leverage. The leverage that 2015 Internet technology affords a single developer is a potent economic force.

fla• 11 years ago

Everyone having a computer in its pocket (no pun intended) also makes a big difference :)

johansch• 11 years ago

In the 80s/90s software was really expensive though. ARPU was probably 100-500x higher than today.

Late 80s/early 90: the typical software product was shrinkwrapped, cost $500, sold in the thousands to tens of thousands.

Now: "Free", ad-based in some form. A few dollars per user at most. More users.

smeyer• 11 years ago

There's still lots of expensive software. In many fields, the leading products are thousands of dollars a seat. There's just also now a lot of software that's a few dollars or less per user.

someear• 11 years ago

Great read but not a fan of the headline. The underlying concept is good - growth and headcount dont always need to scale together, user count is too relative to the industry, company, or product. In some cases, scaling to 1000 users would be a bigger feat than scaling to 20m users.

favadi• 11 years ago

Can someone tell me what it offers over Evernote Web Clipper?

r3bl2• 11 years ago

It's like Evernote's Cleary bundled with browser bookmarks. You save an article with one click, retrieve an article by visiting their website and read it in reading view similar to Cleary's.

As for the Web Clipper, I don't think that there's any similarity.

brayton• 11 years ago

"If save-for-later service Pocket had a spirit animal, it’d be the American field ant."

We need an ongoing list of startups and their spirit animals. How else will I know what products to use.

throwccc1• 11 years ago

I think I remember in the early days there being pushback from content providers about not getting clickthroughs, ad impressions. What's the status of this type of service re: copyright? Neither Pocket nor users have any right to transform / create derivative works -- is there some loophole here about personal use and not re-distributing?

Is it a copyright violation to make a cross-stitch version of a tweet for your living room? To provide a meme generator service that uses NYT headlines?

matthewmcg• 11 years ago

"Neither Pocket nor users have any right to transform / create derivative works "

Here in the U.S. this kind of copying by end users is probably fair use, which is a defense to copyright infringement. There is a line of cases that authorize home recording of video broadcasts. I think the reasoning upholding this "time shifting" or "format shifting" would also apply to a read it later service.

It is very unlikely that a publisher would ever try to sue an individual reader for using one of these services. It is more likely they would try to shut down the service itself by claiming that the service induces or is liable for contributing to the end-users' copyright infringement. But these claims would fail if what the users are doing is fair use.

The weakness of the U.S.-style fair use concept is that it is a case-by-case determination based on several vague factors. Getting a legal case to the point where this determination is actually made is very expensive, so we don't have much precedent to rely on for new kinds of activities. And what precedent we do have is not always easily extended to new activities or technologies.

There's a nice overview of fair use here if you're curious: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-u...

Killswitch2• 11 years ago

Very good article, makes me feel better being a sole employee of a SaaS.

aresant• 11 years ago

Just a random note - https://getpocket.com/ lists 17,000,000 users on their badge @ the bottom, last update I found was in April @ 12m (1), and this article highlights 20m

Back in the day when we built the Trapster.com website (prior to the Nokia team takeover) we a/b tested a static user # that we updated monthly vs. a # that changed and was specific to usage / etc.

We found that the specific was a significant conversion driver and we executed several tests to get that message closer to the top (2).

Of course this was also back in the day where consumers looked on desktops for the app to download vs. the modern trained user that looks on app store.

But maybe something to consider moving up the page and building a script to execute more frequently.

(1) http://web.archive.org/web/20150325061108/https://getpocket....

(2) http://web.archive.org/web/20130812132821/http://www.trapste...

kordless• 11 years ago

The Bandwagon Bias is powerful.

omouse• 11 years ago

Shame it isn't free/open source.

josu3• 11 years ago

It is free and some of its code is open source: https://github.com/Pocket

hokkos• 11 years ago

The new Firefox pocket extension is pure shit, I still use the old one. Please maintain it, not the one forced on users.

misterjinx• 11 years ago

They announced [1] back in June that the old extension will not be actively developed, and recommend everyone to move over to the new one.

[1] https://getpocket.com/blog/2015/06/pocket-is-now-built-into-...

dovereconomics• 11 years ago

For their size,its funding history is even more impressive:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pocket

downandout• 11 years ago

I always find it frustrating that these articles get upvoted, yet they rarely talk about how the company actually grew to X million users - which would be the only useful thing in this article for nearly all of the people that are reading it. An article that talks about how to manage things when your startup magically gains 20M users is useless you happen to be one of the less than 100 people on the planet that have actually had this happen to them.

jkbr2• 11 years ago

I love Pocket. I'm a paying customer. But… I'm also super annoyed by its bugs and will be happy to switch to a payed alternative, that:

1. has a decent HTML parser that doesn't omit images from articles all the bloody time

2. implements a proper state restoration mechanism for its iOS app. It's exhausting having to scroll through my entire article list trying to find the one I was reading (and then finding the original position) every time I switch to Safari to look something up and then back

3. has a highlights & notes feature as a bonus

Please?

bthdonohue• 11 years ago

I work at Instapaper, which competes with Pocket. We have #2 and #3, #1 is a difficult problem and we face the same challenges as Pocket and others.

achompas• 11 years ago

I use Instapaper, and switched from Pocket way back when for these exact reasons (highlights and saving my position). They're implemented wonderfully.

jkbr2• 11 years ago

This sounds promising.

Pocket's inability to remember the current article/position is one of the most obvious, annoying, and (at least by me) reported bugs ever. It makes the app close to useless. Yet they're unwilling to do anything about it. So I'll happily switch for this alone. And highlights/notes is a dream comes true

Going to give Instapaper a shot. Thanks!

tacoman• 11 years ago

I'm anti-cloud. e.g. I run my own mail server and do web hosting for fun. I have a poster of Snowden in my office.

But I signed up for Pocket because it does two things very well. It lets me send things to my Kobo e-reader via email and gets around pay-walled content. I don't recall ever seeing ads either.

I don't pay for the service because I don't need the for-pay features, but would in fact pay for the basic service if it wasn't free. I wouldn't even mind if they in turn payed NYT, New Yorker, etc for the content I'm getting.

jcoder• 11 years ago

Did they ever start using HTTPS? When I tried it a while back, it was HTTP-only.

anotherevan• 11 years ago

Is it just me, or was that article more fluff than anything else?

I have a Kobo ereader and so use Pocket for saving articles that I want to read later, away from the computer. Have found it works very well for this. (That said, if my ereader integrated Instapaper or Readability I’d probably be just as happy.)

My one complaint is that every now and again it finds an article it cannot extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader, and there’s no obvious indication that there is a problem.

To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I’ve read an article I archive it. Then when I’m back at my computer I run my app, which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to follow up and read the HN discussions after I’ve found the time to read the article.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People

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