37 signals line is genuinely horseshit though. They're quite clearly counting people who signup as "people who use our web-based apps". That's a truly false and misleading claim. It's beneath them.
There are straightforward, well-used definitions of "user" for which I have 60, 1.5k, 2.9k, 50.0k, and "well over a hundred thousand" users. They're all equally true and none of them singly or in combination tell you a thing about the health of my business unless you're intimately acquainted with it.
:-)
My patented uniques metric: cat access.log | awk -F " " '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq | wc -l
cut -d ' ' -f 1
It does? Says who? This is your definition of a user. That's fine, but it doesn't extend to being a common one.
Unless of course you delete all the accounts of people that have registered for your service but aren't using it as often as you'd like.
The question is what does "3 million people who use our web-based apps" mean.
A simple truth test: Are there "3 million people who use [their] web-based apps"? Absolutely not. Not under even the most remotely reasonable definition.
If your database has 3 millions lines in the account table, it feels better to use that number than the number of accounts that, say, logged in in the past x months. Especially if that second number is way less.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel it's one of these games where since everyone is doing it, you have to catch up one way or the other.
They don't need to be copycats to be dumbasses.
What else do you call people who sign-up if not "users"?
They don't say that "2 million people use our apps and all of them signed in yesterday", they're just giving you an idea of the total number of accounts they have in their db.
It's marketing, not horse shit.
How so? Over 75 people have used your toilet.
This is like suggesting that McDonalds' "over xx billion served" mantra is supposed to mean that there are over xx billion customers in their store at any given time.
I'm not sure if that's how you read it, but I certainly don't take the statement that 37s makes to be misleading.
Except that "served" is past tense and "use" is the simple present. If 37signals had said 3 million have "used" their software, this discussion probably wouldn't have kicked off. Instead, they used the present tense, implying that 3 million people routinely and currently use the software, which is highly unlikely.