How big is the Threadless Community?

January 15th, 2009 · 10 Comments

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

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Tags: crowdsourcing

10 responses so far ↓

1 Simon // Jan 15, 2009 at 6:37 pm

Well… 2006 was the year of the social network explosion. Could that be the answer?
2 Eve Dmochowska // Jan 16, 2009 at 9:42 am

Thanks Eric…this is all really quite though provoking.

I am surprised that the growth is not more exponential. I would imagine that the more users you have, the more *new* users you will get, until you reach some sort of saturation point.

It all also makes Vinny Linghams’s Synthasite’s membership of about a million users all that more remarkable.

(Btw, small typo in the second headline. Springleap shld be “Threadless”. I know where your mind is! )
3 Eric // Jan 16, 2009 at 11:39 am

Eve - I’m really into the tipping point concept. Build slowly until a certain point, and it builds virally. So am surprised that not more people have joined the Threadless website over the last 2 years. But still an incredible community size.

And changed the type
4 nick // Jan 16, 2009 at 12:06 pm

thanks for sharing. threadless is a cool community but its getting boring there. it’s always the same talk, manner, style…
5 Eric // Jan 16, 2009 at 1:19 pm

it’s always a challenge i guess Nick - when you reach a certain size, how do you keep the site fresh. when its small, the community gets to know one another - but as soon as it becomes larger, the individuality is very hard to keep
6 Andre // Jan 19, 2009 at 2:50 am

Nice work Eric. Of course, the interesting bit of data for Threadless must be the translation from site visits to t-shirt sales.

According to this article (http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/the-customer-is-the-company.html), here are some indicative numbers:
“By 2002, the hobby had surpassed $100,000 worth of T-shirts and attracted more than 10,000 community members”
“Tge user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million — with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Though Nickell refuses to disclose the exact revenue number — perhaps because he now counts Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, as a minority shareholder — it seems fair to assume that Threadless sold more than $30 million in T-shirts last year.”

The two data points of note in there (70k users and $100k in annual revenue in 2002, vs 700k users and $30m in annual revenue by mid-2008) would seem to indicate that a 10-fold increase in users was matched with a 300-fold boost in revenue!!
7 Eric // Jan 19, 2009 at 9:45 am

Thanks for the additional info Andre. It would be great to get more up to date stats on threadless revenue though - any ideas?
8 drunklemur // Jan 22, 2009 at 7:11 pm

Good stuff, I’m a personal fan of the site although I’ve only bought one shirt off it but I’m always looking for good designs. So you are right to point out that it is a niche community hence IMO the retention of the user base will be stronger.
9 MissProject RAK // Apr 6, 2009 at 12:44 am

Keep up the good work and great analysis…

Thanks!
10 Arielle Patrice Scott // Jan 11, 2010 at 6:23 am

Hey Eric, thanks for this! I would love to use this data for a Threadless case study I’m working on.

Quick question - how did you go about getting your data?

Eric Edelstein

Current Business Venture

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