In March, I wrote a post lamenting the fact that web 2.0 companies are facing a huge problem crossing the chasm after capturing the “TechCrunch” early adopter crowd of a tens of thousands of users. . .

How big is this early adopter market? Let’s do some quick calculation. . . Techcrunch is a must read for the blogosphere . . . 35K RSS subscribers. . . aggressively assuming the same # of email subscribers and same # of good ole typed in traffic. . . we get to around 100K people that actually CARE about all the random startups. . . Another proxy . . . Delicious has about 300K users. . and it is by far the largest web 2.0 company. . . So at best the tech blogosphere is probably around 250K users. . . Crossing the Chasm 2.0

I would venture to guess that the chasm for web 2.0 plays is bewteen 100K to 500K users. If I was a VC’s I would not even touch a company until I see a clear trajectory to 500K users and beyond. There are way too many web 2.0 companies stuck at 20-50K users hoping to cross the chasm when their userbase hit a wall.

Both Brad Feld and Josh Kopelman echoed the same thoughts lately . . .

Brad’s Web 2.0: The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant. Brad went as far as me in using Techcrunch to estimate the “early adopter/trial” user base. . .

Josh Kopelman has a perfect post up today called 53,651. This is the number of RSS subscribers to Michael Arrington’s great TechCruch blog, and is exactly at the core of the “first 25,000 user” issue. Since there are 53,651 RSS subscribers of TechCrunch (at least as of 5/12/06) , if something gets reviewed there, it’s likely to get 5,000 to 10,000 users in the next 24 hours “just to try it out.” As so many traffic graphs of these “TechCrunched” products show, there is a huge spike in use for a day or two, and then it goes right back down to where things were before they were TechCrunched.

Josh’s 53,651 post also uses TechCrunch as a measuring stick . . .

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

Given that TechCrunch is growing significantly, notice that they added 20K new subscribers since March, the good news is that atleast the growth of the web 2.0 crowd is not slowing down. . . but in the end, I rather ride on a train that is bigger and faster growing ala MySpace . . . (think Paypal on eBay, YouTube on MySpace, Slide on Myspace) . .

So whats the point of the post? Its to feed my ego and claim that great minds think a like and I deserve to be in the companies of Josh and Brad . . . :) . . . I wish :)