The way Fab CEO Jason Goldberg sees it, the company began as a sort of "gay Yelp." When that didn't work they tried to become a "gay Groupon." Apparently somewhere along the way they also contemplated "gay Facebook" and "gay Foursquare," as detailed in this handy chart.

Never say die.

According to Mr. Goldberg, Fab was cash flow positive by June 20th, just 11 days after launch, leading to an $8 million series A one month later. They hit 500,000 members by August, 1 million by November 14th, raised a $40 million series B Dec. 7th.

Growth seems to be accelerating, the company says it added almost 500,000 members in the last month and a half, topping out at 1,444,443 on December 27th.

Check out the whole presentation on Slideshare:

Admiring their handywork

Betabeat stopped by Stack Exchange the other day to interview the CHAOS team. We snapped some pictures of the big monitor array they have set up, including some eye popping stats on the way traffic is growing. But we didn't want to make those public just yet, since we were invited in to visit to report another story.

But today Stack Exchange COO did an interview with founder Joel Spolsky about the big board and tipped their hat about some of these numbers. Over the last 30 days Stack Exchange has grown 40 percent, hitting more than 17 million page views on 6.3 million unique visitors. Gaming.stackexchange.com led the way, with 245 percent growth in the last month. 

There are now more than 70 sites that make up Stack Exchange, with dozens more being tested in Area 51, the section of Stack Exchange were users can suggest new verticals. All these sites put together still don't come close to the godfather of them all, Stack Overflow, which clocked in at 19 million unique visitors and more than 132 million page views. But the new sites are growing much faster.

The release of SkyRim, the most played game of 2011, has led to the huge growth on the Gaming Stack Exchange. As Seth Schiesel reported in the New York Times, SkyRim is the sort of game that lets a single player get sucked into a fantasy world for hours and even days on end. But when these gamers come across a particular challenge they can't solve, or just want to discuss which way to lead their character, they are increasingly turning to Stack Exchange as the best forum for discussion. For example, What Did Happen on That Drunken Night Anyway and Where Did I Get This Wedding Ring?

Graph from Fred Benenson

Kickstarter's Fred Benenson and Yancey Strickler are back with another data-rich post about growth at the hot New York startup, which helps creative projects crowdsource their funding needs. The two-year-old company just received a pledge from its one-millionth backer, and is seeing new users pledge for the first time at a rapidly accelerating rate.

As Kickstarter writes:

Let’s start by defining what we mean by backer. Someone becomes a backer when they pull out a credit card and pledge money to a project. Being a backer is a higher bar than a user (someone who signs up for a site), and different than a pledge (the transaction itself). One million backers means one million different people from around the world have pledged money to a project on Kickstarter.

The above graph shows the cumulative path to 1,000,000 backers. The first 200,000 backers took 16 months; the last 200,000 took just three months. Currently about 75,000 new backers pledge to projects each month.

Kickstarter projects succeed about 44 percent of the time, but backers have a much better average. 89 percent of backers have given to a successful project, while only 11 percent have not. Mr. Benenson singles out Neil Graham who has backed 94 projects to date and 83 out f 84 have finished successfully, ten pledges are for ongoing projects. That's a 98% success rate, the highest anyone on Kickstarter.

The positive experience seems to keep users engaged. Sixteen percent of users come back to support another project, and these power users contribute 32 percent of the total funds pledged. 90 percent of the $100,729,560 pledged so far has been in increments of $100 or less. Mr. Benenson concludes:

To put this in some context, the 2011 fiscal year budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $154 million. At the current pace of more than $2 million in pledges each week, Kickstarter backers are pledging more than $100 million a year.

Interestingly the milestones of 1,000,000 backers and $100,000,000 pledged came within 48 hours of one another. This suggests the value of each backer being $100, and that’s about right. The average pledge amount is $71 and the average backer pledges to 1.4 projects.

Be sure to check out all the stats and amazing graphs over on Kickstarter's blog. And don't forget the old saying, more money, more problems. Kickstarter is currently suing a particularly persistent patent troll, who claims to have invented crowdfunding for creative projects.

What does it take to get big VC funding? Don't forget to check out our first original web series: The Pitch

Where is everybody?

According to the website Inside Facebook, the companies overall growth took a hit in April and May as users from the social network's oldest markets began to abandon the site.

For the past year, Facebook has added an average of 20 million new users per month. But in April of this year they posted gains of 13.9 million and in May just 11.8.

What gives? Well, Facebook's user base has actually been shrinking in some palces.

The U.S. saw the biggest hit, losing nearly six million active users. Canada dropped 1.5 million while the U.K. shaved 100,000 friends from its rolls.

The company is still on track to hit 700 million users before the end of the summer and has long been reported to earn a steady profit on the revenue it collects from advertising and sales of digital goods.

But leading up to a public offering, Facebook certainly doesn't want to see a serious decline in its growth rate or decay in its older, more established markets. That's a problem that has been hounding Groupon since its recent S1 filing with the SEC.

Facebook still has a lot of room for growth overseas, and Zuckberg was recently in China, a massive market that has traditionally been tough for American firms to crack.

More of us everyday

Yesterday Betabeat ran down some of the growth stats being shared by Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. This morning we woke up to find Netflix has snagged exclusive rights to stream seven seasons of Mad Men at a reported $1 million dollars per episode.

The boom in these streaming video services is paying off for the hardware players who make the set top boxes that bring Hulu and Netflix to people's TVs.

An estimated 2 million folks have cut the cord to cable in the last few years, switching over broadband video services.The big cable players keep insisting that this isn't happening, but the independent research says otherwise.

The result is a doubling in sales of standalone set top boxes like Boxee, Roku and Apple TV from the third to fourth quarter of 2010, according to the folks at Infonetics Research.

Boxee, like most tech companies in New York, is struggling to keep up with the growth. They got turned away from a recent job fair, but are fighting back with schwag, offering a free Boxee unit to folks who refer a qualified resume.