Just Landed Is Shutting Down • Hacker News Board

Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down

#141

Post by adamfeber » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

wehadfun wrote: post #21

zippergz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a purely practical standpoint, it's easier to charge for the app and let Apple do the billing and payment processing, than to set up a system to handle recurring billing (and then you need to deal with cancelations, chargebacks, etc.). I've gone through this thought process for a few side projects, and unless I anticipate really large MRR, it's hard to convince myself to go through the hassle of setting up subsc…

Never used them but https://www.chargify.com/ is supposed to be a service for this. Of course then you run into the disappearing service problem again.

I work for Chargify and wanted to comment on the "disappearing service problem." Chargify has been around for over 7 years and has been growing and profitable for the last 4 years. If disappearing services is a concern, we do not plan on going anywhere for a long time :)

Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down

#142

Post by aws_ls » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #138

radiorental wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what a completely lame excuse" A little harsh. 'Not our fault' and 'beyond our control' are not the same. I read the reasoning to be a more pragmatic appraisal of the predicament they found themselves in - "Just Landed, ... has been on the wrong side of these trends"

Edit including an apology for my harshness. But on the other hand, the key failure point for the app is pretty obvious: its revenue is a one time fee, and the costs are a function of how much people use the app. Based on the post, they clearly mispriced the app, since it depended on new sales to fund existing customers. This isn't very different from a pyramid scheme (without the intention to fraud, naturally): you n…

I doubt if users would have paid much for this kind of App. As its use-case seems to me, a cousin of lot of other free apps like maps (directions), which are done by giants. So basically its something which people need, but have mental categorization of it as a near-free thing.

For roughly the same amount of effort, that you put in this app, you could have a flight search engine. Where you will get something per transaction.

Not taking away from the app. From what I read here, it seems it was nicely done, and must have been quite useful. But its about how much people can pay per transaction (if I can call it that.). Freemium ad based model, has been the dominant Internet culture so far, for information from the web. That is a big barrier, in my experience for these kinds of apps to do well.

Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down

#143

Post by aws_ls » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 2:15 PM UTC

quadrature wrote: post #58

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he did touch on that though. Essentially he's selling bread, and he's got to buy scarce flower at high prices in a convoluted system from a small number of farmers, and be forever at the mercy of the flower selling farmers. Only it's data instead of flower. Further, the data sometimes is bad and causes inaccuracy issues for customers without him knowing, this causes lots of complaints that he has no control o…

hate to nitpick, but you might appreciate that its called "flour". good analogy !.

Perhaps, the HN dupe detection algo needs to be slightly improved to check parent comment? :-)

Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down

#144

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 2:23 PM UTC

wingerlang wrote: post #130

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My buddy enjoys rendering weather data. Using just one source- NOAA - he has to update the app several times a year to respond to their capricious, random changes to web interfaces, server names, random hosting requirements and so on. Its a real thing to factor into any data-repackaging app.

Assuming you mean iOS app which is hard to update instantly. Maybe he would benefit from creating his own middle-man server-api that the app talks to. That way he just needs to update the server-code and the app will still get the right values. Just some thoughts, maybe it doesn't apply.

Definitely a good idea for walled-garden environments. No, he's on Windows desktop and mobile. Not a showstopper there.