111–120 of 221 posts
Looks great, and clearly a lot of time and thought invested. Not news to you, I'm sure, but these sites typically only last for a while. Because nobody has really hit on a way to subsidize a reasonable free plan enough to pay for the bandwidth it collectively consumes, and to implement enough spam protection. Especially once it hits a certain adoption curve. So they either die or find a way to push ads, like imgur di…
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This is a legally...risky strategy. You built a cool thing but unfortunately when you put cool things online they get used for the worst possible purposes.
Yes, I understand there is an unfortunate risk. However, I oppose file scanning, and so do many users, as we've seen with the Apple scandal. If any content is uploaded that violates the terms of service and is reported, they will be deleted as soon as possible, and that user will almost certainly be permanently banned. The terms of service also limits my liability.
Based on this comment thread, I fully expect your site will soon host CP/CSAM, if it doesn't already. Other image hosting services devote extensive resources to engineering a solution to this problem (one that is more robust than user reporting). I would not expect you will be able to avoid this work, and avoid liability.
Edit: I just noticed you're quite young. Congrats on all the great work. I think this CSAM thing could bring misery your way so I hope you find this comment helpful. Good luck out there.
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In 2016, Imgur raised $40 million in funding from investors, valuing the company at around $500 million. In 2021, Imgur was acquired by the media company, MediaLab, for an undisclosed amount, reportedly around $200-300 million. Alan Schaaf, the CEO and founder, reportedly owned around 40% of the company at the time of the acquisition, which would have netted him a significant amount, estimated to be around $80-120 mi…
So the goal is to make another unsustainable business, make everyone use and love it, then sell it to someone who will make it uterly shitty with the hopes of squeezing at least a bit of money out of the people who now rely on it, before it inevitably dies?
Don’t forget to talk about the “wonderful journey” it has been when announcing the sale.
I think the bottom half of your landing page is much stronger than the top half. Why talk about encryption before explaining what the actual features are? "Sharing" is pretty vague and describes many apps. It might be better to lead with the actual features or usecases. Note that you went with a different pitch in this HN post: "it's a file hosting service [...] like imgur". That indicates your hero message needs some work.
You also have essentially two calls to action. "Get started" and "Download for mac". One call to action is better. Your sign up form also looks a bit busy and only has the text "create your horizon account" which conveys no useful information when instead you could explain why people should sign up and point out that it's free forever, which your users wouldn't know if they clicked through to "get started" right from the landing page.
At the bottom of the landing page you have a "sign up" in the paid plan but it links to the same sign up form. Why make people choose between paid and free when it later turns out the choice isn't real? That's a wasted opportunity. You should have only sign up button in the pricing plans section if there is only one sign up page. Alternatively, ask for credit card details if people show interest in the paid plan.
If you make $40/yr for a pro user then you'll need 25,000 pro users for each million in revenue. This is the kind of business where you're gonna have 200 free users for every paid user so about 5 million free accounts for each million in revenue. If 20% of site visitors sign up and 30% of those continue to use your service you need drive 75 million visitors to your landing page to get 1 million in ARR. Not impossible, but pretty difficult. imgur got large because reddit didn't want to do images themselves. Nowadays imaging hosting has become a lot easier because of AWS and Cloudflare, so you'll have to work a lot harder at getting traction.
Source: every image host that has ever existed (note the past tense)
This is exactly how imgur started. It was a reddit user, providing a service for fellow redditors. I am not being snarky. As others have said, media hosting can never really be free.
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Thanks! It's been operating for the past 3 years without any ads or third-party trackers, and I don't have plans to shut it down for the forseeable future.
No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long?…
Looks great, and clearly a lot of time and thought invested. Not news to you, I'm sure, but these sites typically only last for a while. Because nobody has really hit on a way to subsidize a reasonable free plan enough to pay for the bandwidth it collectively consumes, and to implement enough spam protection. Especially once it hits a certain adoption curve. So they either die or find a way to push ads, like imgur di…
Exactly; I still remember reading the imgur announcement post on reddit which had all the same descriptions. They were ad free and they were aiming to be great forever. Now though they're the "big bad". https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/comment/c...
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
I've swapped to using the app Dropshare hooked up to a Cloudflare R2 bucket myself