In an act of ‘active procrastination’ (aka as coding things that nobody needs / wants in order to avoid real work) I wrote a view on my database that would sum up the number of INTERDUBS clients over time.
I was very suprised to find the (somewhat smoothed) result to identify so clearly both growth phases that INTERDUBS had so far. In the beginning I did have only a very very rudimentary public website and growth was only word of mouth. This was intended so that I could spend enough time on the needs of everybody that came on board.
Once what people needed was pretty well covered I made the public site a bit more meaningful and growth increased. Nicely enough support efforts have remained on a constant level: New users need a hand here or there. Often enough it is possible to avoid issues from being repeated by adjusting the code to what the users do expect.