Alexa rank is not accurate when it's higher than 20,000. If higher than 100,000 it is not accurate at all and can be gamed easily. Just get a few friends with the alexa toolbar to visit your site and your alexa rank will magically get a whole lot lower.
Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Let me rephrase then: Not all traction is revenue growth, but all revenue growth is traction(again, by definition).
Not necessarily, in fact that was was of the fallacies of the dot com bubble. Revenue is traction if it is gained at a reasonable cost. There are definitely unit economics that look like growth but come at an unsustainable cost.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you, especially for hearing my earnestness through all the noise - I'm glad it comes through. Without revealing too much, I can tell you that I have a much varied and interesting data set to use to rank companies for the next full YC index. I expect there will be feedback on the method for that one too, but with every iteration it is getting massively better. Crazy idea - javascript startups can put on their si…
I basically agree with this, putting an order on this list might have irked some people, but a list of companies to follow in no particular order might have worked better.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#44I 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.
Anyone can pop up their alexa ranks in the short term, but long term you still need retention, which equals traction. Typically higher the rank, the better you're doing.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#45I feel pretty good about this given that our biggest source of traffic is the Google Chrome Web Store and use of our Chrome application doesn't show up in Alexa rankings. We're fairing way, way better than Alexa would have you believe.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#46This 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…
When you don't have deep (insider) access to key metrics, you have to rely on other indicators of success. Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-meaningful: if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!) Plus, these companies are in drastically different markets. Their key metrics are probably quite different, or (at the v…
Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-meaningful:
That's my point. This measure is semi-meaningful.
How meaningful is it? Very? Somewhat? Well, we don't know.
The way you determine how meaningful it is, is by connecting the dots with another measure. For example, we have this measure that is cheap to acquire but perhaps inaccurate (Alexa). Can we connect it with another measure that is harder to acquire but more accurate (e.g. exit value)?
if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)
I would wager that too. But we don't know until you run the numbers.
Grounding your measures is what separates cool hacks from data you can actually draw meaningful inferences from. I think dmor is trying to do something real here, which is why I think it useful to help her actually push the ball forward and really make something much more valuable.
I agree that exit value / market cap is a good auxiliary measure. I think I also suggested this in another comment.
Re: Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
#47These ranks are so high that any metric based on them must surely have a lot of noise. I guess that doesn't prevent dmor's voting ring from surfacing this post, though.