Interesting.

So it's not mobile, it's EveryMe?

It's not mobile. It's EVERY application.

Fred Wilson pointed this out recently.

Got linked here via Everyme Google alerts - hey Adam! It's not just mobile BUT mobile makes it worse because of all of the reasons I listed. So if you're a startup and you're making a choice, you will fail faster and learn faster with the web than on mobile, and spend less money doing so. And revenue helps you establish clear metrics for success. I've worked on tons of web applications so I understand how hard optimizing it is there as well. You're going to struggle either way so you might as well give yourself a fair chance, which mobile doesn't.

 Can you briefly summarize why it's faster to iterate on web than mobile?

 A lot of the reasons are in the post but I think the main one is the waiting game, esp. on iOS. In the best case scenario, you push an update, then wait a week for Apple to approve or reject. Sometimes it's longer though. And neither Apple or Google provide programmatic access to upload your app binary and manage releases, it all has to be done by hand. You also can't deploy bugs the same way you can on the web because they really destroy your app rating/reviews, which is key to driving a user from visiting your app page to downloading your app. So you spend more time developing carefully and doing QA on a range of different devices. The web shares some of that burden but you always know that you can push updates in realtime to fix critical situations.

Hi Vibhu! I agree with your premise.

Whenever something is ready for the Web, just put it up there. No gatekeepers.

This makes A/B testing a lot easier, too. Put several things up there and see which one gets the most reaction / usage / engagement.

I've never seen Web First as a Growth Hack but perhaps it should be.

What Vibhu says makes a lot of sense. The gatekeeper phenomena as well as the ratings; there is a longer funnel for mobile apps than websites. Websites I may visit, click FB or Twitter connect, and be thrown right into the app or user flow. Apps, as he details so well in his analysis, have many more steps from app store to download to open to signup/register flow to actually using.

It seems true mobile app successes are rare (e.g. Instagram) and the most popular apps either have a desktop or web version, or are games...

Yes, Instagram is the exception to all the rules.

There is no other Instagram. There's just the one. Think about that.