Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are examples of consumer web products which had little or no initial traction, but which persisted in their direction and eventually found success?

20th January 2012

My answer to What are examples of consumer web products which had little or no initial traction, but which persisted in their direction and eventually found success? on Quora

AirBnb famously just kept going.

Posted 20th January 2012 at 6:59 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging - 4th August 2026
Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) - 31st July 2026
OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened - 22nd July 2026

This is What are examples of consumer web products which had little or no initial traction, but which persisted in their direction and eventually found success? by Simon Willison, posted on 20th January 2012.

webapps 44 quora 1,005

Next: What (web) development platform has a low learning curve in terms of development, deployment, scalability, performance, and portability?

Previous: What is the difference between a web server and a web framework?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe