I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials. Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away, including the YC founders.
Traction relates to financials - citation needed
Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
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Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like the value may be in who is on the list and growing. Maybe the order is not as important as the fact that these are all companies worth watching?
Let me say first of all that I have great respect for the way you have engaged with criticism on this post and on your previous ones. Even when I disagree with your approach or whatever, I appreciate your curiosity and eagerness to learn. Some ways that you could make weaker claims but with more confidence in your results: * Have an unordered list of companies that are growing. This was your suggestion. I don't know…
Crazy idea - javascript startups can put on their site to report their actual data to me?
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traction relates to financials - citation needed
Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.
Instagram has yet to make a single dollar, for an extreme example, and yet nobody would argue it has gained insane amounts of traction since in the mobile photo sharing space since launch. I would use Facebook as an example, but they had small revenue generating efforts early on so it doesn't make as clean of an example.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#34I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness or sampling error. A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs B2B companies and…
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#35I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials. Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away, including the YC founders.
Traction relates to financials - citation needed
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#36This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, Alexa rank , is not situated in measures that are familiar. The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow? So this chart show…
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#37Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies. Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000... I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric... For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! A…
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#38This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, Alexa rank , is not situated in measures that are familiar. The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow? So this chart show…
Plus, these companies are in drastically different markets. Their key metrics are probably quite different, or (at the very least) not directly comparable to growth in value / profitability.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#39The problem is that the results are relative. One way would be to pick a keyword with a relatively high search volume which could be used as baseline. Another issue that I can think of is that companies named after common english words i.e. Pebble will have their results artificially inflated. This process might be hard or tricky to automate.
Growth in followers/likes/tweets/+1 counts could be used as a measure of traction.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.
No, that is not a truism. It is a falsism if it is any kind of ism. Instagram has yet to make a single dollar, for an extreme example, and yet nobody would argue it has gained insane amounts of traction since in the mobile photo sharing space since launch. I would use Facebook as an example, but they had small revenue generating efforts early on so it doesn't make as clean of an example.