Can't you just add in Wikipedia-style donation request popup/banners for everyone in general? I reckon plenty of people will be willing to spare some change even multiple times when they log on, just like they do with Wikipedia.
2M users but no money in the bank
151–160 of 367 posts
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non profit doesn't mean you survive on donations. Non profit can still charge money to keep the lights on. If you have 2M users, charging $0.50/year for use can still get you $1M to run your business. Edit: I think the comment was taken quite literally. The point I was trying to make was that the user base exists, monetization for profit is definitely hard, but monetization for keeping the lights on can work. You cou…
As a side point I was curious how low you can charge given processing fees, and you'll have to charge $1 to get $0.50 cents roughly (checked Stripe/Paypal for my currency CAD).
Updated the comment with clarification
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non profit doesn't mean you survive on donations. Non profit can still charge money to keep the lights on. If you have 2M users, charging $0.50/year for use can still get you $1M to run your business. Edit: I think the comment was taken quite literally. The point I was trying to make was that the user base exists, monetization for profit is definitely hard, but monetization for keeping the lights on can work. You cou…
this isn't at all realistic; a tiny fraction of free users are going to be willing to pay for your product.
Updated the comment with clarifications.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#154I don’t know if Jeremy will see this, but: At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations. However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.
I remember reading an article about a non-profit discovering a work around for this problem. They created a subscription plan that had no real value except maybe adding some trivial "feature" like a gold star next to their name (I don't remember the details). This made it possible for the companies to receive a standard invoice that had a greater chance of approval.
Yeah, can't justify donation to corporate, need some reason to pay for stuff.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've mentioned this before on HN, but we had a single postgres machine primary read/write server that did 4k QPS 24/7. It had DDR ram as storage on a PCIe card, of course, but this was before "SSD" was a thing. It was for a site that hosted portfolios of images, for both people in the images and people who took the images, and such. The front end data (the images and text) was, iirc, 3TB. Sometimes we'd need a server…
RAM as storage for DB? So data loss on reboot? Sounds like very specific use case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion-io
maybe i misspoke - at one point there was battery backed DDR ram they used in PCIe, but by the time i came around they were using Fusion IO PCIe devices, which i guess were NAND flash, not DDR. or, alternatively, that is how it was explained during onboarding - "it's like DDR on a PCIe card, so the iops are 1000x that of SAS 10k drives"
unless you're talking about our experiment of tmpfs - then yeah, the use case was "genewitch heard bill gates say 640k should be enough for anyone; here's a super beefy machine to test that theory; theory tested." We didn't run the site live on that machine for more than 10 minutes or so, we switched it back to the fusion-io backed server immediately. It was a proof of concept about one of the things we could do with these new servers - read replicas with the DB in tmpfs for extreme speed and no IO blocking.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#156Switch hosting model. Assuming you run expensive cloud services for $7500.
Get some inexpensive bare metal servers and you maybe can save 80% cost.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#157I'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…
It's also worth pointing out the Exercism isn't for coding newbies - it's for developers learning new languages. This often gets missed.
Shouldn't that make it even easier to monetize? I appreciate the resolve to keep things free for those who can't afford to pay, but a lot of your users are presumably actively employed making 6 figures.
You could follow the Sublime Text model and basically have an honor system—if you're actively employed making more than $X, please pay us. If you're not, you're welcome to use it for free!
The Tech Resume Inside Out [0] uses this model (though not on the honor system) for similar reasons.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#158Switch hosting model. Assuming you run expensive cloud services for $7500. Get some inexpensive bare metal servers and you maybe can save 80% cost.
Their model may be one of the few that would truly be quite challenging to pull off with bare metal—running sandboxed code for 73 languages is hard to do economically with any setup, but being able to lean on cloud services for provisioning would make it much more achievable.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#159Can't you just add in Wikipedia-style donation request popup/banners for everyone in general? I reckon plenty of people will be willing to spare some change even multiple times when they log on, just like they do with Wikipedia.
If anything Wikipedia as an example of how unsuccessful a voluntary donation model is.
0.2% of people who use wikipedia donate to it. Unless you are doing tens of millions of unique views a month, it's probably not gonna be sustainable.
People really hate paying for things. Even things they use and love.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#160Nice post! Nice site! I just added 70 links from PLDB to your site.
Some thoughts before I donate:
> I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model
Great! You will find a way to generate revenue streams. This is a good pivot! I would recommend going fully open source and public domain as you add a profit model. IMO public domain for-profit companies are superior to (C) non-profit companies. Profits don't make you evil, closed source and copyright does.
> every PR in a live Exercism repository should get a review before it can be merged
Why? I recommend just merging in. Quickly fixing/undoing problematic commits.
> $7,500 in monthly donations. That covers our server cost
OMG!!! Stop! This money should go to you 3, not cloud providers.
Server costs should be $0. This should be a local first, entirely client side site. Maybe 1 $50 a month droplet if you need some read/write user stuff. With less than 100K active users in a day, 1 server should be more than enough.
Finally, ditch the (c) symbol at bottom. Go public domain!
Here's my user test and authoring of this comment: https://www.loom.com/share/763e480438c4481ba0aa056c6ef0cbbb?...