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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

#281

Post by synergy20 »

ipaddr wrote: post #280
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,…

I agree with the ads model as a way forward where purchasing a membership removes them. The fairest way.

second this, pay to get rid of ads, a fair deal and proved model.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#282

Post by codezero »

Oras wrote: post #21

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…

That's a particularly difficult vertical to enter. Most large companies (and a lot of small ones) would consider them an "agency" and wouldn't consider any of their candidates. I know that Recurse Center, which is fucking amazing, ran into problems like this when trying to place their participants.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#283

Post by re-thc »

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?

> 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?

Because it doesn't. ECS has its own complexities - perhaps as a result of EC2 fleets / autoscaling groups and more. Suddenly you need launch templates and it goes on. Have you tried updating ECS via CLI? It's largely confusing.

> Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

If only. It has gotten better, but historically CloudFormation has a lot of missing features and still do. Cloudformation can get stuck for hours and you'd just have to wait. The cross region support is terrible. Not to say Terraform doesn't have its quirks, but it's definitely not "worse".

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#285

Post by emseetech »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #146
charlie0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of course still inaccessible for students in some countries).

I've always wanted to experiment with a $5 a month or $10 a year model for low-cost subscriptions.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#287

Post by [deleted] »

smt88 wrote: post #162
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…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#288

Post by JeremyNT »

ihid wrote: post #216
ordinaryradical wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea you were in financial straits and was just using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I’ve really appreciated the platform and it’s already helped me learn so much. I’m donating today and I wish you the best.

Thank you so much for commenting. Always awesome to hear about from the people exercism has helped.

I agree with the parent, I love exercism and although not a daily user I am surprised by this announcement.

I hope you would consider a "hard sell" banner ad for donations in the vein of Wikipedia before giving up on the model. I wonder if there are a lot of potential donors out there who would respond if they understood the stakes.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#290

Post by sockbot »

Is there a way to get funding through libraries? Kind of like how it's possible to read subscription journals and newspapers for "free" in the library. The library must be paying for the subscription right? I think there is a strong values alignment with public libraries and exercism.
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