Path Cuts Through Social-Media Noise

Social network startup Path, designed to cut through the noise of social media, has roused one million users in the two months since its relaunch, equal to the total number of users signed up its entire first year.

The hyper-personal social network, which limits the total number of friends to 50, was cited by entrepreneurial guru Eric Ries in his widely read book The Lean Startup as emblematic of the lean-startup philosophy, which dictates that companies launch quickly with what he calls minimum viable products (MVPs) and gather customer data as soon as possible.

Much of Path's early feedback was quite negative and the slow growth not much of a surprise. But Ries cited them for their “courage” to ignore the negative feedback and continue to learn from its customers. In 2010, he wrote, “Path’s story is just beginning, but already their courage in facing down critics is paying off.”

It would seem “Path 2” has continued to validate the lean-startup strategy and in the meantime produced much data otherwise unavailable without the early launch.

AllThingsD writes:

Beyond the two-million-user milestone, [Path CEO, Dave Morin] shared a bunch more stats and info about Path’s progress to date.

On the engagement front, he said 70 percent of people who use Path in a week return the next week.

Path users have created over 50 million items of content and half-a-billion pieces of feedback. The latter is a somewhat inflated stat because “feedback” is created every time a user looks at content on Path. But for reference, there are 15 million pieces of feedback created on Path per day now, versus 10 million total in the first year, Morin said.

The most common types of content shared on Path are photos, “thoughts” (status messages), and sleep records (users can manually note when they power down for the night and when they wake up in the morning), in that order.

There’s one song posted on Path per second, and the most popular artist is Drake.

Am I getting too “in the weeds” here? How about some geographic data: The U.S. is by far Path’s biggest country, but other fast-growing contributors include the U.K., Germany, Japan, France, and Korea.

Path was cofounded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin, Macster cocreator Dustin Mierau, and Napster founder and serial investor Shawn Fanning. They have raised over $10 million in angel and series A funding and reportedly refused a $100 million offer from Google to acquire the company.

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Michael del Castillo is a freelance reporter for Portfolio.com.