How to get 170k users in six months with zero marketing (blog.corkboard.me)

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I like the visual appeal of it. Evernote or Springpad have maybe 20+ times as many features, but I end up using Corkboard because it's simple and looks interesting.

I showed it to my middle-school daughter and on her own she used it to collaborate on a project with another kid.

I wouldn't say zero marketing :P

I can only assume that what the author really meant is zero advertising. Most of what is described falls under marketing.

This is misleading because if LifeHacker hadn't found your article on HackerNews, everything else probably wouldn't have happened. So I don't know if I would want to build something people wanted, and not focus on marketing... and hope one or two people spread the word to others. You might've gotten lucky. Yes, building something people want is the first step, but there's more.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like you've had 170k unique visitors on your website, not 170k users -- quite different things, no?

The advice is good, though.

Totally misleading headline. Not OPs fault -- the problem is in the post. 171k unique visitors is not 170k users.

Take my project, a daily email newsletter (http://dlewis.net/nik if you're interested). It's about a year old, and I've had about 500k uniques over that period. I have 5,000 subscribers.

I'm one of Corkboard's 171,000 people but I'm not a user of Corkboard. I tried it for a few minutes and left, not coming back since. And honestly, if you're not capturing people, that traffic is not all that valuable.

This isn't to say that you aren't capturing people; hopefully, you are. Just that you shouldn't conflate a visitor with a user. Visitors visit; users stay.