SLL Subscribers Vs Time

published Sep 10, 2010

First, if you’re not a fan of Eric Ries’ Startup Lessons Learned, this post won’t be very fun for you. Luckily, there’s a very simple remedy for that: go there right now and read a few articles! There’s some amazing stuff, and I guarantee that you’ll learn something new and thought provoking.

If you’re intrigued and want to read all of the posts, then I also humbly recommend you go and buy his blog converted to a PDF on Leanpub: http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. It’s much easier to read it as a PDF than clicking through all of the blog posts, and you get updates every month or so with all of the new posts.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the data!

Every once in a while, Eric asks his subscribers to do a survey for him so he can find out about them. The title of the survey is always something like “Lo, my 50 subscribers, who are you”. The latest one is Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?.

Just for fun, I decided to plot the number of subscribers Vs time. Here are the results:

Number of SLL subscribers Vs Time.

Hockey stick graph? I think so!

That naturally leads to the question: can Eric legitimately say that he has exponential growth? Let’s take a look…

Number of SLL subscribers Vs Time with curve fits

Sorry, Eric, but the data does not support that conclusion. You can say that you have second order polynomial growth.

I know, not quite as sexy, but I guess it’ll just have to do.

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