Lesson in patience? Internal email from when Twitter was three months old

Good News!!

Our short code 40404 has now been approved and implemented on most carriers. Verizon, who we were concerned about, cleared yesterday. It looks like we will have the code tested and working on all carriers by mid next week. What does all this mean in the big Ol’ timeline of life? Well, I’ll tell ya. It means that we are one week away from a vocal, visible, actual launch-effort-outward-push type-o-deal. To aid that effort we now have invite via email. I think that this will do a ton to help spread the word of twttr far and wide. We also have personalized url now. Check it out: http://twttr.com/noah. Nice!

Also. We currently have 160 beta testers. We receive about 100 status updates per day. We are sending between 800-1000 SMS per day.

Some things come to mind when reading this internal email from the folks at Twitter three months into their project.

An obvious first thought: "You have to start somewhere, and if you don't start, you'll never get there."

Second: Having users without a way to monetize a product is exponential better than having a product you want to monetize without users.

Also: If you can find something users want to do anyway, you don't need to compel them to use it.

Finally: The answer to the how of the product was simply 140 characters in a text message. The "why" is still being discovered today.