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

Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM - 6th June 2026
Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement" - 28th May 2026
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit - 27th May 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