It has been great fun building Findory as it grows and grows. And Findory sure has been growing. Below is a graph of total viewed hits on Findory.com each quarter for the last two years:
"Viewed hits" means hits on the webservers excluding robots and redirects. Viewed hits in December 2005 was 4.5M, total hits 7.1M, viewed page views 3.2M, and total page views 5.9M.
Growth was 16% month-to-month in Q4 2005, a little slower than the growth rate earlier in the year, but still healthy growth. At that rate, Findory's traffic doubles every five months.
It is interesting to compare Findory's traffic levels with some related startups and websites. For one example, according to Alexa, Findory's traffic is roughly the same level as Rojo, Memeorandum, and MSN's Start.com.
When I finished the bookkeeping for this month, I was pleased to discover that Findory was also cash flow positive (by a few dollars) in December 2005. Fun milestone.
Including early work and prototypes before Findory.com launched, I have been working on Findory for about 2 1/2 years now. Running this scrappy, resource-starved, self-funded startup has been a remarkable experience, learning how to do everything from system administration to economical viral marketing to wading through legal goo. I look forward to what 2006 will bring.
14 comments:
Congrats on the great growth Greg. Nothing wrong with being cash-flow positive either!
Question regarding "hits": Are you using the traditional meaning of "hits", which would include basically any call made to your web servers including images, javascript files, etc? I assume not, since that's a pretty meaningless statistic, but unless I read the description wrong, that's what you're using. Page views and unique users would seem to be the graphs you'd want to show... and I'm sure both are equally impressive.
Hi, Mike. Yes, the graph is of hits. Hits includes image requests, etc.
Findory never has used a lot of images, Javascript, or other goo like that, so the hits are meaningful. You can see that because the hits aren't significantly higher than page views, 3.2M page views in Dec 2005 compared to 4.5M hits.
The main reason I'm reporting hits is that Findory moved to different boxes twice in 2004. The logs from those early boxes are in a different format, so hits are what is easily available for early 2004.
The page view numbers do appear to be pretty similar. Dec 2005 viewed page views were 3.2M. Sep 2005 viewed page views were 1.9M. Q4 2005 viewed page views were 9.7M, Q3 2005 viewed page views were 5.5M.
That's an average monthly growth rate of 21% from Q3 2005 to Q4 2005, stronger than the 16%/month growth in hits during that period.
Congrats, Greg! Good work deserves to get noticed, and thankfully, it has been.
Don't ever take away Findory. I'm not sure I could live without it!
Greg, Thanks for Findory. I use it every day as my primary RSS reader now! The suggestions keep it close to digg as a must have tool.
Thanks for a loyal user! Shawn Smith
Thanks, Nathan and Shawn!
Congrats Greg. I am waiting an international edition or an italian one :)
Well done Greg from Melbourne Australia. Findory is a great news site. I hope 2006 brings you some fruitful discussions with the big boys.
Congratulations from Portugal! Findory is a great tool. Thanks Greg.
Congrats! Findory continues to rock.
Greg
When did you first start doing revenue ? This is a big trade off in any start up. What made you start at that time ?
Luca,
There is an international edition (and one with italian news, though in english). Just start clicking on lots of stories about italy...
Being cash flow positive is good... even if it is by a few bucks.
Congrats...
I'm catching up on you guys :)
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=6m&y=p&u=findory.com/&u=rojo.com&u=tailrank.com&u=memeorandum.com
I didn't realize Alexa could do inline comparison like that. Pretty sweet I must say.
Congratulations Greg. What you have accomplished thus far with Findory is impressive and inspirational.
Congratulations Greg. Does that cash-flow-positive status include budgeting for your own salary? If so, even more impressive.
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