How consumer based products become an instant success?

All products start small, humble, with minimal traffic on their sites... facebook, myspace, linkedin - all started with few hundreds, thousands of users before it became millions - in this post, I wanted to share how typical growth trend looks to be for a consumer product.

Usually the traffic jumps in multitudes of 100x, for example - if this week traffic was 100 unique visitors, it could easily become 10,000 unique visitors next week or in next month... it is very important for the product to be ready for this sudden jump in traffic, you will not have time to go down, bring down the site, redo the web front or backend to handle the new found traffic - the winner is who... expects this sudden jump in traffic & just waiting for that to come, if you take the route of... "let the traffic come, then I will solve my scalability problem" - then you may be too late - as the users who may see your site slow or unresponsive because of heavy traffic - will never come back & it will start spreading negative word about your site & chances of getting such a traffic again will be hard or impossible.

Lesson... if you think the site is for millions of users & you want it to be scalable, build it that way - there is nothing like, I will build it to handle current load, will solve the scalability problem later.

-Bhaskara