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I’ve thought about writing plenty, but my life is pretty much routine at the moment - work, a few movies, a few restaurants. routine!

no interesting new events, no networking with rockstars, no A list movie stars.

just building up an internet startup from concept to implementation - and it’s taken hard work and lots of time.

but i’ve decided that if i don’t write something, anything, then blogging will become a historical event in my life - so i’m going to try write a few words a few times a week, even if nothing momentous has happened!

We did have the elections in SA - that’s pretty major. The ANC won convincingly again, and the DA was victorious in the Western Cape (including Cape Town where I live).

And I’ve watched 2 Monty Python movies over the long weekend while recovering from flu - And now for something completely different and the Life of Brian - i’ve never appreciated Monty Python till now, but it is truly different, funny and genius.

And now for something completely different - back to work!

Threadless is one of the oldest crowdsourcing websites starting around 2001, and has a large active community. But how big is the Threadless community?

I spent some time looking at data, and have come up with the following conclusions about the size and growth of the threadless community.

A. The overall number of people in the threadless community

size of threadless community

Threadless took a number of years to reach the “Tipping Point” which Malcolm Gladwell always speaks about.

The threadless community started on November 12th 2000 when one of the founders of the company, Jake Nickell, became the first person to register.

By the end of 2002, only 3600 people had registered on threadless, and it was only in mid 2005 that the threadless community reached 100,000.

But the tipping point had been reached, and over the next few years, the community grew rapidly and is now quickly approaching the 1 million mark.

B. The number of new users per year joining the Threadless community

threadless community increase per year

As can be seen from this graph showing the number of new signup’s on threadless each year, the first few years were slow, and only when the tipping point was reached in the 5th year, did the number of people joining threadless in a year, increase considerably.

The best year was 2007, when over 200,000 new people joined threadless, but in 2006 and 2008, they had just under 200,000 new signup’s as well, which is nearly 4000 new people joining threadless per week.

C. The growth rate of the threadless community

growth rate of the threadless community

Starting from a low base, the growth rate of the threadless community over the first few years was well over 100% per year, but as their community had increased to a considerable size, even though the number of users over the last 3 years has averaged 200,000 new users per year, the base is getting larger, and thus the growth rate has fallen.

From a high of over 200% growth in the first year, it has now fallen to a 50% growth rate in 2007, and a 30% growth rate in 2008.

When measured against the growth rate of Facebook or Myspace or the other social networks, this growth rate is not attractive, but for a niche community, the threadless growth rate in double digits off a nearly million strong base is impressive.

If you would like to use this article on your website or blog, you may do so freely as long as you reference the following:

This research was conducted by Eric Edelstein, the co-founder of the Crowdsourcing community springleap.com

At 6.50 this morning I was alerted that our server which hosts springleap.com was done. For just over 2 hours, we worked flat out to get it up as quickly as possible, and by 9am, it was live again.

These are the lessons I learned:

1. Know who is responsible in your company for the server.

There should be a primary person and secondary people, and everyone should know who they are. I was emailed by one of the team to say they thought there was a problem. The primary person should have been emailed, and if necessary, sms’d and called immediately. It would have allowed the problem to have been resolved even quicker.

2. Know the details of your server

The primary person and the secondary people should have the information of your server log in, who your host is, which server you are using. This information should be easily accessible - both on your primary and secondary contacts computers and a hard copy in case you can’t get into your computer.

3. Know the details of your host

If something goes wrong, how do you contact your hosting company? Via email, web based forms, telephone, skype etc? In our case, our hosting company has an office in South Africa and Germany and many different packages. After a number of precious minutes speaking to South Africa, we found out they can’t help. We tried various numbers in Germany, and they went through to the wrong departments. The quickest method was the online form - once we logged in there, and sent a request, it took 15 minutes for them to find out that some hardware had gone down on our server, they fixed it, and we were back up and running.

4. Backup

We’ve learnt from this lesson that things do go wrong. Hardware fails, software fails, problems occur. We backup regularly, and have been investigating even more powerful backup solutions for springleap. We’ve now realised that backup of both the site, and the data is essential, and should not be forgotten at any stage.

If a problem does occur, and you know who is responsible, what your details are, who you should be contacting, and how you should contact them, problems can be resolved quicker. And don’t kid yourself - problems do happen - be prepared.

Now I need a strong Whisky!!!

60 Seconds

Life of Brian

April 28th, 2009 · No Comments

How big is the Threadless Community?

January 15th, 2009 · 8 Comments

What to do when your Server goes down?

January 14th, 2009 · 3 Comments

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