Ask HN: Is a user base growth from 190k to 3.3M in 4 years impressive?

3 points by sassyboy 11 years ago | 5 comments

If someone mentions that they were responsible for overseeing this growth, in their resume should I be impressed? i.e. they built systems which scaled to meet this growth.

burnout1540 11 years ago |

That sounds like registered users, which may be completely different than active users. The number of registered users tells you very little without also knowing the number of active and/or concurrent users and what type of activity they're doing.

gt565k 11 years ago | |

I agree. Look at engagement rates and how the curve looks on that end. It is much more important than stale users who registered but never used your service/product.

Either way, I'd say a few million users is pretty impressive.

seekingcharlie 11 years ago | |

Agree that total users shouldn't be looked at without % of actives, but he's not asking if it's impressive from the POV of evaluating the business. He's asking in terms of evaluating an engineer who handled the scaling from a technical POV.

rt897 11 years ago |

Yes, but depends on what kind of system. Our company has written telecommunication systems to handle over 50M users and yes we do brag :)

Blackthorn 11 years ago |

No offense meant to you personally here, but only in Silly Valley could someone seriously ask such an inane question.

Over four years, plenty of user bases go from the millions to zeroes. Even maintaining a user base over that time should be considered an impressive feat.