Algunos números sobre Vlingo, Twitter y Wikipedia
El otro día escribí un post para el blog de Vlingo, la startup para la que trabajo. Les puede interesar a los que siguen compañías de internet. Está en inglés y acá va:
I want to share with you some findings that are very encouraging when we look at Vlingo’s long term growth potential.
The first data point is that Vlingo has a very high retention rate of approximately 75%, which is the percentage of a given month’s users that come back and speak to Vlingo again the following month. According to this Nielsen study, the retention rate is a factor that determines the potential reach an application can have. You can see in the chart below that Vlingo positions very high in the curve, giving us a good shot at having up to 60% of market penetration.
The second observation has to do with the rate at which different users use Vlingo. We found out that Vlingo has a broad appeal across our user base, or in other words that Vlingo usage is very spread and not concentrated in a few power users. To understand this point in the context of other popular applications let’s take a look at the chart below done by this Harvard Business School study. The green line at 45 degrees shows a hypothetical situation in which everybody uses an application or service exactly as everyone else. This is very unlikely to happen in the real world, as there are always users that are more active than others. In this context Vlingo for BlackBerry and Vlingo for iPhone are widely used across their user base – the top 10% contributes just around 40% of the content – in a way comparable to how social networks engage their users. On the other hand, examples of applications that are very concentrated in prolific users are Twitter and Wikipedia where the top 10% users account for 90% of the contributions.
The fact that Vlingo shows such a balanced and equitable usage among its users is a very good indicator. It reveals that Vlingo is flexible enough to accommodate the different needs of its big user base and not just target a small nice group of power users.
To be clear, the fact that Vlingo is so engaging does not imply automatically that a massive audience is guaranteed. But it indicates a very high potential and encourages us to make Vlingo better known every day.
