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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#71

Post by ihid »

xrd wrote: post #53

This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…

Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment.

I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#72

Post by ihid »

heeton wrote: post #41

I don’t know if Jeremy will see this, but: At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations. However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.

Hello :)

Appreciate the comment. If you have thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them here: https://forum.exercism.org/t/exercism-teams-coming-soon/1266...

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#73

Post by andrewstuart »

swiftcoder wrote: post #70
Laaas wrote: post #10

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

That's only around $10/hour, which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc.

>> which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc.

It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link

See my comment below.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#74

Post by ihid »

aswerty wrote: post #25
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.

We have about 70,000 MAU.

People tend to spend an intense few weeks learning a language, then disappear for a year. Then come back and learn another language. A large part of the 2M is still "alive" (I don't know exactly what number that would be, but I'd think around 600k) but Exercism isn't the sort of product you use day-in-day-out.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#75

Post by ihid »

h1fra wrote: post #7

Kudos for being passionate and providing stuff for free. A lot of people will probably tell you to add a paywall, not sure it's breaking the "non-profit business model" if you keep the price really low. But at the same time, even a low price would deter some users (myself included) and it would also devalue your content :/

Thanks :)

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#77

Post by ihid »

leetsbehonest wrote: post #45

I just don't agree with this leetcode industry. That, recruiters and the whole tech hiring industry that has spun off from a process originally intended to get to know and gain confidence in a potential employee. It is just I have doubts in the educational help these platforms really deliver given that there are already so many resources to learn these days say compared to 20y ago.

We're not really part of the "leetcode industry". People have used Exercism to learn new programming languages for a decade. We've deliberately not wanted to become a place of competition or a recruitment space. We've always focused on helping people learn based on their intrinsic motivations.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#78

Post by swiftcoder »

andrewstuart wrote: post #73
swiftcoder wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only around $10/hour, which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc.

>> which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc. It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link See my comment below.

And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. For which you need a development team with significant operations experience to do correctly - who will surely cost you more than $90k/year

I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#79

Post by blitzar »

surfingdino wrote: post #31
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.

> Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Busy investing in AI?

These guys should "pivot to AI". Should be able to get a full B for an Ai company with 2 million users.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#80

Post by re-thc »

dspillett wrote: post #59
andrewstuart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.

If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someon…

> If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …)

History has proven that most of the time these reduce availability than increase them. Any sort of failover and the complicated setups to get it going introduces bugs and issues more than the redundancy it provides.

Have we forgotten the number of large single server applications running on single linux machines that never needed an unplanned restart or had a crash for years? And you can't beat AWS us-east-1 or Azure or GCP in outages lately.

And I doubt any service like this needs auto-scaling. Most services barely will use up a proper single server i.e. something with >96 cores >1TB of RAM.

> “Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes > And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense.

There are ways to not manage all that and still be in the cloud. It's called don't use AWS or Azure.

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