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Don't Be A Free User

blog.pinboard.in

41–50 of 177 posts

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#41
What I dislike are companies that don't start with a business model and still don't have one after some time of operation. Makes it feel like hey are being built to flip or are trying to be the next Twitter and not many have been able to pull that off.

Sure ads don't always look the best but put say one small one and get some revenue started. Offer a premium account, even if the value proposition isn't great, even if it's just a cool badge for your use to say they are supporting the product, the users who love your product will probably take it up.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#42

To partly rebut what maciej is saying here, I'd point out that Backblaze is a very successful not-free service which was also courting purchase offers; paying for a service is no guarantee that you'll get to rely on that service forever, which is a major failing of web-based services in general (and a frequently-mentioned point from my clients when I suggest using some web-based service or another). But I mostly agre…

I will probably start paying for his page archival service within the next month. I'm more comfortable with it not only because of his track record so far, but because I know I am his customer. If it were a free service, I'd be far more concerned about how many concessions he'd be willing to make for his real customers -- advertisers or metrics companies or who-knows. As the old saying goes, "If you're not paying, yo…

Cash isn't the only way to pay for a product. Notice in TFA he mentions ads as a perfectly legitimate source of income.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#44

This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…

You see most of these services either have advertisements to bring home the much needed money to progress (see YouTube, Flickr) or are simply owned/backed by internet big shots which provide them visibility in the economy with these free services (Picasa, Delicious (until a while back)). With still others, they have a business model based on paid and free services (see Skype and Grooveshark). The gaming sites, like Zynga, sell speed, better products; again some revenue model.

This is exactly the point the author wants to bring home. If somebody plans on providing a free web-service, you clone it, think of a business model (ads or user registration) and wait until you're the only one in business.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#45
Based on their signup help page (https://pinboard.in/help/fee/) the price is "number of users * $0.001". Now there is no telling when they started with that pricing but assuming it was from the beginning they have made around $50k. Since it was created 3 years ago that is an average of around $17k/year.

I realize the archival accounts are $25/year and I have no way of knowing how many they have but assuming it doubles their profits which I doubt they are still making less than $40k/year minus expenses.

I'm not huge on selling out but I would rather build a large app and flip it vs run a company that profits less than $40k/yr

(I did not double check my math so please forgive me if I rushed through this too fast)

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#46
No, the way it's done is that you offer everything for free and get a large userbase. Once you have the userbase, then you start ruining it with advertising or sell it to a company to will slowly kill it, like Yahoo or AOL.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#47

The reactions I'm seeing are mostly people zeroing in on the "paid services sometimes shut down" counterargument. And, yeah, that's true. But I don't think charging your customers for your service means that you will never consider being acquired; I think it means that your exit strategy is to serve your customers with this great service you've built . It's the difference between a long-term strategy of "God I hope w…

http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mi...

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#48
I'd suggest the nature of free and paid services biases how many of each we think gets "shut down" post-acquisition. Free / freemium services will tend to have tens or hundreds of times as many "users" versus a paid service of the same value.

So when one gets shut down, we all notice because so many of us had an account (even if we weren't using it.) Whereas when a paid service closes, it impacts only a tiny fraction of us in comparison, so we don't hear the same hue and cry.

The fact is that for a large company like Google or Amazon, the $$$ income from most small startup acquisitions (ads or paid) isn't large enough to be a factor in the decision to continue running that product. Either they believe that it's going to turn into a business that does tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales a year, or they don't and it's better to move those developers and resources off to a project that might.

I've seen this firsthand - I've had to fight to maintain services that were making lots of money with a few staffers, because a large company just didn't think they were worth the hassle of supporting from a legal and administrative perspective. And I understood that point of view from a management perspective, in many cases.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources.

The terminology is not good. "Free website" often means "hugely profitable website"

That really depends on how far you stretch the term "often".

I think the number of unprofitable free websites vastly outnumber the "hugely profitable free websites".

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#50
post #35
post #27

I love Pinboard, but it's a one man operation. Maciej is extremely susceptible to get hit by a bus tomorrow, leaving me without my $9.23 and all of my bookmarks. You're telling me that if someone offered you $1-5 mil to lead a team at insert huge tech company here you'd turn it down? Bitch, please. That chart is overall correct, but it's not like paying is suddenly going to be a panacea. I give flickr $25 a year, but…

I suggest you backup your bookmarks on a regular basis using the handy export page http://pinboard.in/export/ You might also want to tone down the snark.

What snark? I'm being totally straight here.

I love Maciej and all of his body of work and I aim to give him many of my dollars in the future - but this is something I'm going to nitpick on.

The reason why I feel comfortable using Pinboard on a day to day has nothing to do with the fact that I've paid for it because it's just as fragile and likely to suddenly disappear. It has a high "hit-by-a-bus" factor.

It's because Maciej loudly proclaims his love for letting people export their data. That's it.

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