As I mentioned, Lazarus is now a Mozilla recommended add-on. That seemed to be good for about 3,000 downloads a day last month. But on Sunday night I glanced at our stats and noticed we’d had 10,000 downloads. Gosh.
Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred. 
I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated all over the place. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.
A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.
[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]
About the Author
2 Responses to Lazarus Rising, Part II
Leave a Reply
|
The Author Seth Wagoner is CEO and Geek in Chief at Interclue.
|
 |
|
Interclue is our popular Firefox add-on. UltimateStatusBar is our similar but much more lightweight add-on for Safari. |
| We also make the "life-saving" Lazarus: Form Recovery for Firefox, Safari and Chrome. | |
| Mail: Seth AT sethop D0T com | |
| The idyllic scene atop my blog is the view from my parents' place in Kaikoura, New Zealand. They rent out the upper floor apartment. It's not expensive to stay there, and I can sometimes even arrange mates rates if you ping me before booking yourself in. | |
Lazarus is probably more monetizable, but Interclue is so awesome! With a bit more development it’ll fall soundly in the “revolutionary” pile. Please don’t deprioritize it too much
I am just getting to know interclue, but have had Lazarus running for a while now, and I like it. If I had any money (seriously) I would send it; if you want to swap houses sometime, I could get into that, providing I can get the little woman (how can a little woman be a better half? Yet, it always gets proven no matter what the other half’s ideas might have been…) I’ve wanted to see much of NZ since I was 17…42 years ago. Tick tock. Sigh.