Only real metric I see is 800 monthly donors and $7500 from them ($10 per person) - that's what that business is worth, those are really people that want (they pay so that's what matters).
Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.
If it’s two million churned out dead accounts, non-replaced, and 800 actual people who care then the author of the post was posting in bad faith and I’d retract my remark.
To get from 800 real people to two million user id rows one would be running some kind of spam scam, and if that’s the case I apologize.
I do think they really can have legit sign ups, but people "wanting to learn code" usually fizzle out quick. I have my experience as a dev when friends/family/colleagues ask for guidance, I provide them with links resources and some mentoring and after 2-3 days they don't follow up ever again.
But not using metric like daily active users, returning users, might indicate that they want to inflate their worth or they convinced themselves to believe in the wrong metric.
Oh I don’t doubt for a minute that there’s some gap here. But the key people are serious enough to list rigorous code review as a core value in the next breath after “I just stopped paying everyone including myself.”
If the millions of users thing is even a little real, that’s a galactically less risky play than friggin LangChain for Pets or whatever.
I hope I’m being paranoid but I get the sense that someone pissed off someone important.
Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.