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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

#171

Post by PaulHoule »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #159
dartharva wrote: post #151

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.

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.

Also it's a subtraction from the legitimacy bank account. It's well known that Wikipedia doesn't need those donations.

Endless telethons for public television in America annoy 100 people for every one that donates. Despite that you see ads on public TV for the Archer Daniels Midland corporation all the time even though, allegedly, there is no advertising on public TV.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#172

Post by pcthrowaway »

Lionga wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$7500/mo is less than half of one headcount --- if you could get all hosting for free . This is a sideshow. With these numbers, their viability is not determined by hosting costs. The problem here is that we all have opinions about hosting, but not so many useful opinions about business models, so hosting feedback is what this person is going to get.

$7500/mo easily hires two great 10 yr experience developers in most parts of the world.

Maybe I'm out of touch with how things have changed over the last year or 2, but 2 years ago you'd struggle to find 1 great dev with 10 YoE for that price ($90K/yr)

Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd find a great dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K/yr, and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1 bad dev with 10 YoE for that price though, but you'd usually be better off just hiring one great dev than any other combination.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#173

Post by madamelic »

thinkr42 wrote: post #166
smt88 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $ What? No. If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure. Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.

This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.

Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion.

Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people inside of it.

Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are profiting very healthily off of their work.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#174

Post by deisteve »

Lionga wrote: post #163
stavros wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to armchair ops your decisions, but maybe do consider moving to some dedicated Hetzner servers, at least for the runners. You can probably reduce that cost tenfold relatively simply.

Move everything to Hetzner (or the like) at double the capacity that AWS has on average and you still spend about 10% of what you spend on AWS. That is how stupid costly AWS is and 99% of people using AWS are wasting money like there is now tomorrow.

Problem is Hetzner has such stringent user verification its tough to get hosting on there.

You don't even need to use Hetzner, I'm actually quite surprised they are spending 2k on DB. For the env isolation i understand they need ec2 but...

it shouldn't cost anywhere that amount, for instance I have 3 million users on a $40/month digital ocean VPS with just Django + Postgres and I have far more reads and writes.

for env isolation you could spin up a $5/month VPS and shut it down when idle

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#175

Post by mlyle »

thinkr42 wrote: post #166
smt88 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $ What? No. If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure. Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.

This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.

Not everything beneficial to the world has a viable business model.

In the best case, you get to change the world and make a bunch of money. Sometimes, you just have a viable business selling sugar water. And other times, you're doing something really good that's just not going to get you paid.

There's nothing wrong with the last thing, other than its potential lack of sustainability.

I'm now a teacher; I could easily make 10x my comp elsewhere; possibly 100x. Measured on your scale, the only value is what I'm getting paid. But it turns out that those good feelings are worth something to me.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#176

Post by Atotalnoob »

swiftcoder wrote: post #104
re-thc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper. > but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams. No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS' complexity and silly factor can mak…

I think a lot of folks make their lives unnecessarily complicated by trying to do things on AWS in an explicilty non-AWS way (I inherited a startup codebase last year that did this to themselves in spades). Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity? Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

Less vendor lockin.

My devex team has developed helm charts we can use that automatically detect EKS, AKS or gcp K8s and configure the parts of an app to work with each environment, but the end users of the helm chart don’t really have to care.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#177

Post by tptacek »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #172
Lionga wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$7500/mo easily hires two great 10 yr experience developers in most parts of the world.

Maybe I'm out of touch with how things have changed over the last year or 2, but 2 years ago you'd struggle to find 1 great dev with 10 YoE for that price ($90K/yr) Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd find a great dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K/yr, and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1 bad dev with 10 YoE for that price tho…

It's not $90k/yr, it's something substantially less, because the fully loaded cost of an employee is much higher than their nominal salary.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#178

Post by computerdork »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #144
pico303 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users. I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way down ($1000/mo?). What is all this computing power going towards?

I imagine they need to run code for their exercises on a server. There are probably lots of ways to optimize that, and perhaps even ways to get the code running in the browser via webassembly or something, but all of these things require technical expertise and time.

That's interesting. Well, they are coding gurus, so maybe it's feasible :)

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#179

Post by ihid »

Lionga wrote: post #168
ihid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At 1.500 signups per day (45K a month) 70,000 MAU are horrible retention. Usually you need about 10 times MAU to signups. Unless you can make that happen you have nothing that people actually use and not just try out.

It takes people about a month to work through a language track, learn the language, and get on with their life. So I wouldn't expect to have more than 45k MAU. 70k MAU is because people LIKE the site and come back to learn another language.

We're not trying to be some business that sucks people into using our site every day and monetise them. We're aiming to teach people effectively and efficiently and then get them moving on with their lives.

We could make the site less efficient, or change it's purpose, but that's not the mission of the organisation.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#180

Post by ihid »

stavros wrote: post #122
ihid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base. Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than…

We're not shutting down :)

But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.

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