Gittip has doubled for the third time in just over a year. On January 3, 2013, we moved $1,425. Using that as the base, here’s what doubling means:
- $1,425
- $1,425 x 2 = $2,850
- $2,850 x 2 = $5,700
- $5,700 x 2 = $11,400
Today, we moved $11,683. That means our dollar volume has doubled three times in a little over a year. Here are the actual numbers:
- Week 31 - January 3, 2013 - $1,425
- Week 49 - March 9, 2013 - $2,882
- Week 66 - September 5, 2013 - $5,769
- Week 89 - February 13, 2014 - $11,683
Our number of active users is growing slower than our dollar volume. This makes sense because we have more companies giving on Gittip than we did a year ago, and they are generally able to give more than individuals. For example, &yet announced a program in November (they’re currently our top giver), and Engine Yard stepped forward this past week.
From our charts page:
We mark time from week 31 because that’s when our founder, Chad Whitacre, started working on Gittip full-time and building a team in earnest. You can see that growth was relatively stagnant prior to then, except for an initial burst, and a small bump that turned out to be fraud.
It took 18 weeks for our dollar volume to double once, 17 weeks to double again, and 23 weeks to double the third time. We chalk up the slight slowdown in growth to the fact that we released no user-facing updates to the site in the fourth quarter of 2013. Instead, we focused on technical infrastructure and team-building. Our Company Retreat in early January demonstrated the success of our team-building efforts, and marked a return to user-facing changes.
Since the retreat, we’ve released the following user-facing improvements:
- Ability to connect an OpenStreetMap account, to provide a free-as-in- speech sign-in option.
- Ability to connect a Venmo account, to facilitate one-time, out-of-band gifts.
- Ability to list a bitcoin address, to facilitate one-time, out-of-band gifts.
- Dropped the 150 minimum threshold for Communities, to make it easier to find people you know on Gittip. Currently the Perl community is discovering Gittip.
We’ve also improved our customer support system, as well as continuing to improve our developer experience. We’ve soft-launched a major redesign project to engage the design community in Gittip and build a truly world-class, user-friendly product.
On average, we’re doubling our volume every four or five months. If we continue at this rate, we’ll hit $22,800 by June or July, and we should pass $100,000 per week sometime in the spring of 2015.
Thanks for using Gittip, and stay tuned! :-)