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

Beeper acquired by Automattic

blog.beeper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 310 posts

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#131

Post by garbageman »

duxup wrote: post #125

>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks. What are people using that for? Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?

Not a user but I imagine it's like the blackberry model where texts, messenger, whatsapp, and whatever else all go to the same inbox rather than having to check 40 different apps. I really wish that idea would come back.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#132

Post by gtirloni »

ghostly_s wrote: post #82
fareesh wrote: post #74

Their mini tech was built on weird hacks - is all their tech the same or is there something legit powering it?

Well if you consider private APIs/impersonating 1st party clients weird hacks then yes, none of these services have official 3rd party client support.

I was thinking about this after seeing the announcement.

It's fine for open integrations like Matrix/IRC but all other are with proprietary services provided by for-profit companies.. that usually doesn't go well in the long run (e.g. Twitter clients).

It seems to be a really high risk investment. I wonder how they plan to pull this off if/when they start to grow and attract more attention.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#133

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

mtlynch wrote: post #114
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such an app/service would not work towards the interests of message recipients - but the message senders. Those interests are not aligned.

Why are they not aligned? If I send someone a text and they receive it in their email inbox because that's their preference, what difference does it make to me as the sender?

When you send an SMS text message, there's a understanding (and therefore, an expectation) that it goes directly to the recipient's phone/smartwatch and that they can reply immediately; i.e.: it's a system for high-priority (and therefore highly-intrusive) communications - this is why people generally don't give-out their mobile-phone number to strangers.

Unless you go to the effort to tell people that you route your SMS messages to e-mail and therefore reply in-your-own-time (hours/days/weeks delay), the people trying to contact you aren't going to expect that: they're going to expect you to reply much sooner. I'd be out of a job if my boss' panicked SMS messages about how our prod website is down went to email instead of my phone.

-------------

Any kind of "universal" messaging platform that anyone can use to send anyone a message needs to allow recipients to set how maximially intrusive those messages are - but senders might also want a way to set how minimally intrusive those messages are. Those requirements cannot be easily reconciled in a way that protects privacy and prevents abuse while also allowing anonymous and unsolicited messages or senders. So far the "best" way to do that today is by segregating senders (not recipients) by system (e.g. private SMS for high-intrusive; less-private-but-guarded e-mail for low-intrusive; public social-media, etc).

Consider services that tried to work-around that, such as LinkedIn's paid messaging feature - which didn't exactly go very well.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#134

Post by mvkel »

housebear wrote: post #88
mvkel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

This is the same board that approved the Tumblr acquisition, presumably. So...a good board...?

For pennies on the dollar, and for a very specific strategy, which Mullenweg outlined pretty thoroughly.

Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#135

Post by joenot443 »

rchaud wrote: post #94
joenot443 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)

WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace. Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.

You’re right, that distinction’s very important. I’d never recommend WordPress.com, I’m just a fan of Wordpress the OSS.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#136

Post by mvkel »

PedroBatista wrote: post #101
mvkel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

That's the script but reality is not exactly as the script says. There are a lot friend and family members of so-and-so who are "worth" a few million dollars and that money was largely a gift. They largely spend a lot of time pretending to be "founders", "advisors" and "angels" but no, they got lucky. Not everything is like that, but there's quite a lot of that within the billions of someone else's money's ocean that…

$125 million dollars. To "help" a friend save face?

When a similar acquisition was made a year ago? And it perfectly aligns with a their stated thesis that texting becomes a CLI in the future?

The more successful an entrepreneur, the more allergic they are to spending money

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#137

Post by markx2 »

housebear wrote: post #88
mvkel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

This is the same board that approved the Tumblr acquisition, presumably. So...a good board...?

They approved the tumblr deal.

Matt promised targets.

Every target was missed and financially the deal was a failure.

The board then stopped any further acquisitions.

I would guess that texts / beeper were cheap and that Matt is looking at a very very long time to profit. He was once a fan of the 'pizza/team' ratio that Bezos/Amazon pushed, so maybe that's where he is looking.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#138

Post by saynay »

duxup wrote: post #125

>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks. What are people using that for? Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?

I would imagine most people are not using all 14, but some subset. If you have friends and family that are not all on the same services, having a unified inbox to talk to them all without having to remember who you talk to on what is convenient.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#140

Post by batuhanicoz »

duxup wrote: post #125

>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks. What are people using that for? Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?

Rarely a single user would use 14 different chat networks. For example for me, I have two WhatsApp accounts (number for my current country + home country), Twitter, Instagram to chat with old friends, Facebook for some relatives, LinkedIn for networking, Signal to chat with my lawyer, Telegram for hobby communities.

I simply wouldn't talk to a lot of people in my life if I had to use a different app for each.

We also aim to be the best chat app, period. So even if you are using only a single account on a single network, we want to supercharge your chat experience with AI, snippets, good search, labels, advanced notification options, and much more.

Post reply on HN