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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

#261

Post by arbuge »

ysofunny wrote: post #253
arbuge wrote: post #251

> The one area we have had some promising success is in advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very sustainable strategy. To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most theoretically optimum use of their…

so basically letting google be their business???

Better than shutting down entirely I think.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#262

Post by grosjona »

They shouldn't have advertised 'free forever' on the website. OMG. In that area, people don't even think about the next day.

One of the things I learned is that you should never offer even one tiny ounce of added value which the average user is not capable of perceiving.

Literally the entire idea of profit rests on arbitraging between perception and reality. You don't want to pay for surplus value that is beyond your customer's perceptive capabilities.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#263

Post by lanecwagner »

I don't know if iHiD will see this, but this is Lane, the founder of Boot.dev. One of our students shared this article with me, and it really sucks to see. Exercism has always been a go to recommendation of mine for students who need additional practice or to learn languages we don't yet teach.

I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot, and id be happy to chat and see if there's a sponsor opportunity thats uninvasive and that could at least keep you going.

anyhow, you can reach me on Twitter @wagslane or via email: lane @ boot dev.

either way, hope things turn around

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#264

Post by insane_dreamer »

charlie0 wrote: post #133
insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.

You could use crypto for micro-transactions (it's one of the main problems that crypto was meant to solve). LiteCoin, for example, apparently has quite low fees[0] ($0.03-0.04) Monero much less than that. But enabling this in a frictionless manner for users is probably difficult (I don't own crypto myself).

[0] https://coinwire.com/cheapest-crypto-to-transfer/

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#265

Post by insane_dreamer »

8bithero wrote: post #218

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free…

Donation fatigue even is more real than subscription fatigue.

The only way I can see this working is a recurring donation with a low enough amount that people will just set it once and forget it.

So instead of a $1/month subscription, you could try a $1/month recurring donation.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#266

Post by filleduchaos »

nicbou wrote: post #239
8bithero wrote: post #218

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free…

Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things. The vast majority of users don't donate, and that includes the most demanding ones. I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving feedback from people, including some that said I saved them thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one percent of my revenue on a goo…

> Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things

In my (limited) experience they mostly don't work because the people/projects that need donations are way too coy about asking for money. Donation buttons get tucked out of sight and/or cloaked in twee language like "buy me a coffee!"

I like to point to https://archiveofourown.org as a counterexample. Hardly the most critical project in the world - it's just fanfiction - and yet they raise a few hundred thousand dollars a year in public donations (solidly surpassing their budget goals) because they run an actual, clear, focused fundraising campaign twice a year.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#267

Post by thelastparadise »

lanecwagner wrote: post #263

I don't know if iHiD will see this, but this is Lane, the founder of Boot.dev. One of our students shared this article with me, and it really sucks to see. Exercism has always been a go to recommendation of mine for students who need additional practice or to learn languages we don't yet teach. I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot,…

[flagged]

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#268

Post by pdimitar »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #242
nicbou wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things. The vast majority of users don't donate, and that includes the most demanding ones. I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving feedback from people, including some that said I saved them thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one percent of my revenue on a goo…

I'm assuming that you are talking about "All About Berlin"? (I am deliberately not linking, because you didn't, and there is probably a reason for that). I run a number of apps and services that don't make a dime. In fact, they cost me thousands. I don't mind. Monetization is a real pain in the ass, and I stay away from it (for these services). I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not mu…

> I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I like having full control of everything I do.

Thought of handing off some of those money-making opportunities to others, after you vet them beforehand?

I could use an alternative income stream and I am very tired of the employment grind. But I never networked and that has been biting me on the rear for the last 10-ish years.

Apologies if that's too direct. I am keenly feeling the lack of freedom and the lack of "frak you" money in the bank.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#269

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

The reliability/uptime guarantees of the cloud providers are dubious, but in this case I don't think they even need to be discussed: this product makes no profit. No money is going to be lost if the thing goes down, because it already doesn't make profit. In fact, just keeping the thing up is making them lose money, so short of completely shutting it down, moving it to more cost-effective hosting would at least mean they can keep it going for longer on their donations.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#270

Post by Nextgrid »

swiftcoder wrote: post #105
andrewstuart wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does. Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS. The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think i…

> Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way. For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS. Where is your load balancer? Your database redunda…

> Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

Who cares? At this point it's a hobby project that makes zero profit and is bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose the DB tomorrow. No more money is going to be lost if they go down for an hour or a day or a week (in fact, they might _save_ money if they don't get more AWS charges during the outage).

They have nothing to lose, and about 6k/month to gain by moving to cost-effective hosting, which could actually make this a decent side-project.

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