Reminder: Twitter was started in 2006 and didn’t really take off until 12 or so months ago. It must have been hard to stay motivated, keep investors happy, and innovate from 2006-2008ish.
People sometimes think things like twitter just take off overnight. Nope. It took them a few years to get real traction.
Keep at it if you are still in year 1 or 2 of your business. Give your business at least 3 years.
Twitter was a unique service at that time I guess, and in 2006 people might not have been bothered much about tweeting and stuff like that. The benefits of twitter came up as it grew – networking, marketing, searching what people say. All that could only happen after a gradual growth of usergroup. So a wait of 1-2 years was a safe bet for twitter, after all you never know when a trend catches up, if you have an app that doesnt have a userbase, one should wait and watch it grow for a while.
Nice reminder 🙂
SMS (Simple Message Service) didn't take off at first either. Just after years it hit the mainstream. SMS was built in anyhow, so people started using it someday. Twitter had to seek the potential market first (or the other way around).
– HisKingdomComes –
Believe me i know, the original VC's tried to shut the company down. Some of us quit, thinking it was a bad idea. And we were burned out by working intensely for 2 years on Odeo.com before twitter was started. It really took about a 1 year before it started getting traction among early adopters. Then 2 years of it not being clear it could jump in to mainstream culture.
As one of the people who left, i thought it would always remain niche. Boy was i wrong.
I joined in early 2007. Really, SxSW 2007 is when it seemed to take off with the early adopter set. I remember it being a really enthusiastic user base and there was lots of development around their API and quite a bit of discussion about twitter outside of twitter.
So, I would imagine it felt like it was taking off pretty early and has steadily increased since (until the meteoric rise this year).
great post, this should let one keep focus and never give up.
I remember SXSW 2007 – I thought it was a great tool to get people to go to lunch together at a conference, but not much else… Yes – there were many naysayers for Twitter until Oprah used it. 🙂
http://tinyurl.com/TwitterBadExample
No disrespect to Rishi, but I actually think this is generally bad for entrepreneurs to use Positive Black Swans like Twitter as models for two reasons:
1. To evaluate his advice in context you would have to look at all of the companies with relatively flat growth in the first 2 years and count the number that disappeared, stuggled along, or explored. This is classic survivorship bias evaluation much as was done in The Millionaire Next Door.
2. I don't think it is even true. The graph is misleading because has an exponential. IIRC Twitter was starting to grow in late 2007/early 2008.
"Never give up!" is generally bad advice. Follow lean start-up principles of Customer Development and hypothesis statements. You'll quickly figure out if you're on to something or if you need to change paths.
Hey Rabble – thanks for giving us your insight from inside the walls at Twitter 🙂
Kevin – Wonderful screen-cast and argument. I'm also a fan and a student of Steve Blank's work and believe in the customer development and hypothesis statements. I recommend everyone to read it and plan on discussing it in the next few weeks.
I saw the twitter graph from a slightly different angle. What it says to me is be sure to keep enough dry powder to keep iterating until YOU make the choice to keep trying or move on to something else. Most companies die from lack of iterations.