Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

blog.newsblur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 146 posts

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#61

Post by meh02 »

klox wrote: post #28
amix wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.

3400 is only the number of new paying users in the last 24 hours. The amount of annual income from this product will now end with "million".

LOL, no.

After the Reader-is-dead news cycle ends, the money will stop flowing, and the real work (supporting paying users) begins.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#62

Post by misiti3780 »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24
recuter wrote: post #3

I'd just like to point out that '$24/yr * high four-figures of paying costumers' with only one employee ensures NewsBlur will be around for a long time. :) This is the kind of single founder "life style" startup that VC's would paw-paw that is Doing It Right that many of us aspire to. The other ones I can think of are Pinboard and Instapaper. I'd rather go this route, personally, here's to more like these. Cheers.

Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down. Pinboard and now Newsblur.

but delicious is still around, it was never shutdown, and from what i can tell, is better (from a functionality perspective) and has a bigger community than pinboard. the site design of pinboard alone turns me off to it

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#63

Post by conesus »

micshasan wrote: post #58
conesus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's not a 1-to-1 analogy, but the idea is the same. Knowing you're free to come back to Lotus by using Excel frees you from the chicken-and-egg constraint of waiting until your entire office is on Excel. With NewsBlur you know that you can host your own instance if your dependency on the newsblur.com hosted instance breaks.

This analogy only helps for developers that would be comfortable installing and operating their own instance. I don't see many folks being excited about the opportunity for personal use. For other folks hoping to build their own service, commercially or otherwise, having access to your code provides a huge savings in time to market.

You would be better off by just copying features and writing your own code than taking NewsBlur's highly coupled code and trying to forge your own business out of it. I think they reserve that task for developers sent to hell.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#64

Post by mnutt »

conesus wrote: post #20
mynegation wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed. Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given…

This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis). The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it…

Have you considered releasing VM images? I've thought about it for open source projects that have a bunch of dependencies, but haven't actually tried it.

On the other hand, you may end up with people running the app that have no way to maintain/support it.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#65

Post by vineet »

codexon wrote: post #50
conesus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's not a 1-to-1 analogy, but the idea is the same. Knowing you're free to come back to Lotus by using Excel frees you from the chicken-and-egg constraint of waiting until your entire office is on Excel. With NewsBlur you know that you can host your own instance if your dependency on the newsblur.com hosted instance breaks.

I see what you mean by that, but open-sourcing all your software instead of just having an export function seems risky to me. In our area of business, our features get copied really quickly.

It might be risky, but there are a lot of other companies that are doing exactly the same thing and and have shown a great path for newsblur.... (for example, wordpress, sugar-crm, etc).

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#66

Post by vineet »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down. Pinboard and now Newsblur.

Quick, someone make a search engine!

See https://duckduckgo.com/ :-)

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#67

Post by your_perception »

conesus wrote: post #31
rdl wrote: post #29

I'm interested in your decision process in picking Reliable and then Digital Ocean.

Originally price, now price + API for deploying new instances. If you check out my fabfile.py script you'll see that I have EC2 setup and ready but I don't use it because it costs more, runs slower, and is a pain in the butt to maintain.

I am guessing you're using DO VPS for very specific purposes. I have a VPS on it myself, but they do not provide any way for VPSes to network with each other, which is annoying for multi-host setups. If you have them communicating with each other, I'd appreciate it if you shared your approach.

And congrats on your increased traffic.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#68

Post by conesus »

UberMouse wrote: post #55
conesus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Intentional. Otherwise you'd stare at a blank screen until you click a story. 2. That's an unfortunate bug, but one that will probably get sussed out when I work on scaling over the next month. Dev is largely just a re-skin. They share a backend.

Why can't there be an option in the cast of 1. for it to automatically open the first unread story when I click "All stories"? Basically what I am doing by pressing the first unread button. I can understand not doing that by default since people may want to see their unread feeds, but I always just go to the first unread one anyway.

In that case, there's a preference waiting for you that you're going to just love...

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#69

Post by rssident »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #37
electic wrote: post #5

I tried out NewsBlur and sadly, Feedly seems leagues better.

I looked at Feedly and Newsblur last week as I look for my eventual Google Reader replacement. Feedly turned me off because it has no open web implementation, it runs through the Chrome web store. Aside from some developer related plugins I refuse to use a completely superfluous wrapper around a website if I am on my PC. I've tried Newsblur but it's just so "busy" (I know where my mouse is on the vertical axis thank…

Try http://rssident.com

The UI needs work but it is very simple.

Scalability will not be an issue. It was designed from the start to be scalable. Just add servers.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#70

Post by jscn »

conesus wrote: post #8

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. As…

Just wanted to say, NewsBlur and Pinboard are both big inspirations for me. It's awesome to see people making money off of open source software.
Post reply on HN