A thought stream on XKCD click and drag • Hacker News Board

Re: A thought stream on XKCD click and drag

#11

Post by jtauber » Thu, Sep 20, 2012, 2:33 AM UTC

vineet wrote: post #8

TillE wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freemium is almost always a losing model for small businesses. A trial would be nice, though.

I don't know. There are many people who just expect freemium to solve all their problems. Freemium needs to be carefully applied, and needs to make sure to be aligned with evaluation needs of potential paying users. Most times startups do not work on the details to make it happen. 30-day evaluations are really helpful when an urgency exists to use a product - in my experience for lots of business sales. But now-days…

Heroku was able to do it because it had a lot of funding in the beginning (and is now part of a public company). Very hard to bootstrap freemium, especially if there are per-user costs like with hosting.

(I run gondor.io so I understand :-)

Re: A thought stream on XKCD click and drag

#12

Post by s_henry_paulson » Thu, Sep 20, 2012, 9:25 AM UTC

And here I came to the comments to read about people's thoughts on the article...

Re: A thought stream on XKCD click and drag

#13

Post by vineet » Thu, Sep 20, 2012, 1:31 PM UTC

jtauber wrote: post #9

vineet wrote: post #4

Thoughtstream is cool. But it needs atleast a 30-day evaluation for me to get a sense of how easy it would me to use. But perhaps even take the idea further. How about the ability to create up to 30 thought streams for free. Anyone who has created that much will see its value and will want to pay?

Over 10,000 people were willing to pay $50 to see app.net built without ever having seen it.

Please don't take lessons from app.net. They may have some good ideas behind themselves, but quite frankly I have not figured what they are.

Re: A thought stream on XKCD click and drag

#14

Post by vineet » Thu, Sep 20, 2012, 1:45 PM UTC

jtauber wrote: post #11

vineet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. There are many people who just expect freemium to solve all their problems. Freemium needs to be carefully applied, and needs to make sure to be aligned with evaluation needs of potential paying users. Most times startups do not work on the details to make it happen. 30-day evaluations are really helpful when an urgency exists to use a product - in my experience for lots of business sales. But now-days…

Heroku was able to do it because it had a lot of funding in the beginning (and is now part of a public company). Very hard to bootstrap freemium, especially if there are per-user costs like with hosting. (I run gondor.io so I understand :-)

Very good point. I am a big fan of what you are trying to do with Gondor.io.

Yes, bootstrapping freemium is hard. I would love to see discussions on how to do it right.

Don't get me wrong. I am revenue driven. I am not crazy about freemium. But I see way too many entrepreneurs not putting themselves into the mind of their target users.

I would trivial Gondor.io as a more specific Python oriented version of Heroku. The benefits are hopefully more obvious, and I would argue that freemium is not important for Gondor.io.

However, the problem I have had with micro-blogging platform is in the details, which often results in me not using it more than twice or thrice. I would easily pay $250/year if ThoughStreams worked for me, but I don't know that. Currently the site looks great and it makes me really want to try it, but I doubt that I will be able to make a decision in 30-days. I am willing to try though.

Best of luck!