<story><title>How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People</title><url>http://firstround.com/review/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eliben</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m one of the first paying customers of Pocket.&lt;p&gt;Alas, their quality has been going down recently. The most important feature - keeping the location &lt;i&gt;inside&lt;/i&gt; an article between app invocations, is not working. For long articles, if I stop in the middle and want to resume later, there&amp;#x27;s a 80% chance that Pocket will happily set me right in the beginning.&lt;p&gt;Besides, their rendering for articles with code sucks, so I almost always use &amp;quot;web view&amp;quot;, a decision Pocket also forgets every other time.&lt;p&gt;So I end up using Pocket as a convenient keyboard-shortcut to save articles, but on my phone actually open them into Chrome, which has no problem remembering the location in a tab.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Pocket Hit 20M Users with 20 People</title><url>http://firstround.com/review/the-story-behind-how-pocket-hit-20m-users-with-20-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>11thEarlOfMar</author><text>When I see stats like this, or like the 400MM users&amp;#x2F;40 devs, that WhatsApp had at one point, I can&amp;#x27;t help but think back to, say, 1985. What would it take to develop and scale a software product to that number of users?&lt;p&gt;I worked for MultiScope in 1991. We had to order discs and have disc labels printed, copy the compiler onto the discs, have manuals and boxes printed, stuff and shrink-wrap the boxes, ship to Ingram Micro for distribution, and then wait 2-4 weeks for our product to show up on the shelves at Egghead. I recall 5 developers, and we were ecstatic to ship 4,000 copies of a major new version.&lt;p&gt;That gets me thinking in terms of leverage. The leverage that 2015 Internet technology affords a single developer is a potent economic force.</text></comment>