Ask HN: How many users does your webapp need to be worth something? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many users does your webapp need to be worth something?

For a free to use site with advertisements(as the revenue model), roughly how many users would make this site worth anything?

View on HN

Not enough information to answer the question. It would depend what your application does, who the users are, what you are advertising and how, what kind of response you get to your ads, what type of activity users think they are engaged in, etc.

I think you could make an app with 50 users that is more valuable than Facebook, if I'm allowed to pick whom the 50 users are and what they do. (Military officers with purchasing authority who use the app to make trusted strategic forecasting decisions. BAM.)

Yep, need to know an estimated click through rate and/or revenue per user for the ads. That might be a better question to ask, given more details about your users.

I was thinking executive bankers and chief policy makers before you mentioned officers.

Value = Number of Active Users X the Depth of their Pockets

Just normal people, it's just a simple app to help people with something they do quite often.

Normal people like poor twentysomething males who are habitually adblind, value only digital content, and steal all the content that isn't nailed down, or normal people like forty-something females who make purchasing decisions related to the website niche for households with $80k+ average incomes, where goods responsive to the needs of the niche have little branding and 90% plus profit margins?

Well, anyone who lends stuff to their friends, which is everyone. Normal that is. I'm not being that helpful.

Careful here: I think you'll find that borrowing trades off with buying (i.e. people who buy don't borrow, people who borrow don't buy). Aside from a few industries where one does not have to have money to get it extracted from you, people who don't buy do not make good targets for advertising.

Try chatting up some middle class housewives. I may be totally off my rocker here, but I'm thinking borrowing items of significance is vastly, vastly more common among twenty-somethings in communal living situations than it is among people who own property.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com