Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

It must have been an intense mix of fear and excitement trying to fix anything and everything that broke, but NewsBlur deserves it IMO. It is a great product, and I think this post makes it clear that he cares about his users' experience.

Props on having an exciting validating road over the next few months!

Likewise, what are some of the engineering things you'd really like some of the more dev heavy users to maybe help via pull requests with? :)

(I see that the github issues list is relatively short)

Hi, So i have noticed that you are very forthcoming with data, such as providing the number of premium users on your webpage, and I hope you continue this - I really hope you become more succesful with this Google Reader debacle going on.

1) Why are you open about the number of users ? (personally I think its great) 2) How do the real-time stats work, I notice that the amount of regular users was over 20k a few days ago, and now its 8k. Are these the users who have used the client/service in the past 24 hours ? (and not the actual total amount of users)

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay

I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky.

(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html)

    The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the
    product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to
    switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

    ...  ...

    That's the barrier to entry. Not how hard it is to switch in: it's how hard it
    might be to switch out.

    And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of
    Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of
    Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently.

    Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people
    from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using
    Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody
    else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel
    fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you
    can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology.

If you know that in the absolute worst case that you can still use the product even if it's shut down, then by golly, you have even less of a reason to not switch to it.