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Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

posthaven.com

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Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#81

Post by garry »

8ig8 wrote: post #51
garry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product. Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't…

What about making this a non-profit, run by a board? Different idea, but, for example Matt M. created the WordPress Foundation to independently carry out the things he believed in. http://wordpressfoundation.org/

Yes. I love this idea. Right now I have to focus on coding, but this will be necessary down the road.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#82

Post by garry »

rubyrescue wrote: post #64
garry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product. Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't…

since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's". second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

This is one of the first features we will be launching in the next two weeks: Posterous import. This is a high priority as I have years of data on there as well. We're putting the finishing touches on it as we speak.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#83

Post by a4agarwal »

garry wrote: post #44
jbail wrote: post #31

How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service? Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in th…

When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product. Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't…

We both wanted hyper growth. We both wanted venture funding. We both wanted a lasting company. It's not easy and I didn't quit.

I built a team. Accountability and execution in the company. It's not as easy as it sounds.

We made mistakes and learned. I think everyone did well and are on to great things.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#84

Post by hp »

[deleted] wrote: post #77
jbail wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt it will be awesome. But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects. Now you are saying you will never se…

[deleted]

VC funding is usually a decision to "go big or go home" on a timeframe, while bootstrapping allows you to continue indefinitely at any scale once revenues cover costs. Both have risks but the VC model is explicitly to spend at unsustainable levels in order to try to get big fast. That's kind of the whole point of VC. It isn't wrong or selling out, but you have to know what you're getting into (as founder, employee, or customer). If you spend way ahead of revenue to grow fast, and you don't go big, then you usually go home.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#85

Post by 8ig8 »

garry wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what does that mean to you? Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to be. #1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool kids are…

Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support.

Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#86

Post by marginalboy »

jbail wrote: post #31

How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service? Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in th…

I don't think you're being very fair. You're suggesting a false dichotomy.

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#88

Post by Cushman »

tedunangst wrote: post #79
rubyrescue wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since you're posting here, you have a grocer's apostrophe on the home page... it's "URLs", not "URL's". second, can we auto-migrate somehow from a posterous backup - my wife runs a blog on posterous and is really worried that she needs to migrate. if i could tell her that she just now needs to pay $5/month and not rely on me to hack something together w/octopress and github she will be so excited.

Depends on your style guide. Sometimes the apostrophe is preferred for abbreviations because it separates the s. ie, it's not something I'd correct somebody for unless we had specifically and previously agreed to a particular style guide.

You might as well use the unambiguous form, though. (And what do you do with possessives, as in "CDs' sizes"?)

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#89

Post by benrhughes »

This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.

Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.

On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.

[1]http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown

Re: Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven

#90

Post by PavlovsCat »

unimpressive wrote: post #27
iSnow wrote: post #2

Great - until that one gets acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook|MS|Google... I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high-level than HTTP.

Design one.

or even better, help these guys out: http://friendica.com/
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