2M users but no money in the bank • Hacker News Board

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#21

Post by Oras » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:08 AM UTC

I'm just thinking out loud here, but for 2 million users learning to code and improving their skills, there is a chance they want to change jobs or are already looking for one.

Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent?

There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or monthly fees to search CVs.

Your unique selling point would be companies are not getting hundreds of custom AI CVs flooding their application; they search for what they want, and you're helping both sides.

Good luck!

edit: grammar

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#22

Post by Laaas » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:11 AM UTC

re-thc wrote: post #16

Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

> Are they using AWS? Yes!

You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#23

Post by philipwhiuk » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

> For the last few months, I've been working on a new educational product teaching coding fundamentals that I'm going to launch in 2025. 96% of people who try to learn coding give up - which I find unacceptable, so I'm aiming to change that.

Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the side.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#24

Post by galactus » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #13

Why not charge 5000 users money instead of servicing 2M users for free? It seems to me if you can’t get 1 in 500 of your users to give you $10 per year then maybe your product isn’t actually valuable or useful and should just shut down. I say this without knowing anything whatsoever about this product or its utility; it just seems like a general thing. If you have this many signups and you can’t charge even a tiny ti…

They say in the article they tried to force 1000 random users to convert to paying account and none of them did

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#25

Post by aswerty » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #18

How can there be NO money in 2 million users?

I would be more interested in active users. I have had personal projects with 100s of registered users yet I was the only one who actually used it. So 2M users might translate to somewhere between 1000 and 10000 unique users per month. Considering the niche; many of them young people with very little discretionary spending money.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#26

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:14 AM UTC

bux93 wrote: post #12

What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean? Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as a matter of basic accounting?

Non-profit is OK. Non-revenue is a bit of a non-starter.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#27

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #2

Why is this free? That's the problem here. They'll easily get 10-100x their donation amount if they make this freemium. They don't even have to degrade the core experience. Life takes energy. You need to make some of it back to survive. Asking for money isn't a dirty thing.

It's free because all the competition is free and switching costs are zero. They claim that trying to upsell people causes them to quit.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#28

Post by thinkingemote » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:17 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #18

How can there be NO money in 2 million users?

They have 800 monthly donors totalling $7,500 per month. That is some long tail but I doubt the 2 million are active users.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#29

Post by choult » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:17 AM UTC

EduardoBautista wrote: post #17

benreesman wrote: post #15

Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.

Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website. Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.

They're not officially a non-profit, they're a limited company. Obviously they can still operate as such - that's down to the board how they distribute profits via dividends, so they might choose to do so.

A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#30

Post by j-a-a-p » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 9:18 AM UTC

Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

That is easy to turn around, if the company would do smarter and cheaper hosting we would ask why they didn't spend more time into finding a viable business model.