141–150 of 177 posts
Both paid & free have their place in the world. Not quite sure why the one is being portrayed as evil? I also don't think its the responsibility/right of the user to fix the business model of the company ("Make them charge you or show you ads."). To me the "pump and dump" approach is perfectly legit. Just make sure nobody gets hurt. e.g. Allow customer to export their data. Companies aim to make money, not win a papa…
Dear HN. Please charge me money or show ads. /s
Based on their signup help page ( https://pinboard.in/help/fee/ ) the price is "number of users * $0.001". Now there is no telling when they started with that pricing but assuming it was from the beginning they have made around $50k. Since it was created 3 years ago that is an average of around $17k/year. I realize the archival accounts are $25/year and I have no way of knowing how many they have but assuming it doub…
As far as I remember, this multiplier is not valid anymore. When it comes to estimating the number of users, another post[1] on the Pinboard blog sheds some light on that. [1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/spikes_logs_and_the_power_cl...
If you are a moderator, feel free to delete the other comment (the one without any children).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't disagree more. Startups just going away over night is _the_ major objection I hear from business users (small and large) against using any of these products. Purely consumer oriented entertainment kind of apps may be a different matter, but for anything else consumers are very apprehensive when there is any talk of losing access to an app they rely on. Unlike geeks, they can't just take some CSV dump and m…
A business which wants a guarantee of continued service from a vendor knows exactly how to phrase that: contract .
Could be an angle for big companies like IBM and Microsoft's cloud offerings, or at least that's what they're trying to push, with pitches of: come get something reliable from us, with guaranteed service that we'll actually honor and will still honor in 10 years, instead of some startup that might be dead or bought next year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't disagree more. Startups just going away over night is _the_ major objection I hear from business users (small and large) against using any of these products. Purely consumer oriented entertainment kind of apps may be a different matter, but for anything else consumers are very apprehensive when there is any talk of losing access to an app they rely on. Unlike geeks, they can't just take some CSV dump and m…
A business which wants a guarantee of continued service from a vendor knows exactly how to phrase that: contract .
This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…
No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down.
(I shudder every f&%&^n time someone doesn't understand a generalization, and thinks that a few counter arguments disprove a statistical rule).
"""See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter."""
He is not saying that "free services are never carried on by their purchasers", he is saying that free services with no monetization model are in most cases not carried on by their purchasers.
Not familiar with all of them, but Flickr, Paypal and Skype, all have ways of making money and paid accounts. And Youtube has ads too (don't know about Picassa).
Finding out that Trunk.ly, which I've grown to love, is shutting down...well it flat out pisses me off. Great post. Thanks for having the courage to state the truth, that most startup founders don't give a about users.
> Thanks for having the courage to state the truth, that most startup founders don't give a about users. Is this a public secret. Do you think Steve Jobs was so obsessed with user experience because he cared about you personally?
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"I can just ignore them." Only if you block them. Advertising is not informative, it's coaxing you, and just because you don't consciously decide you're going to read an ad now doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
BS. Advertising is useful and informative, and I choose which interest me and which don't. If you can't ignore things that don't interest you, then you have problems. Walk down a city street. It's full of adverts for shops you might want to go in.
On the other hand, while you claim my previous statement was BS, I claim your statement displays denial.
This article brings up a good point: if you just found some super-cool free web application that you love? Odds are the only thing you're doing when you use it and recommend it to your friends is creating a nice resume for some large company to do a "talent acquisition" Large companies love this -- they find a couple of guys who are able to identify and engage audiences and then they kill their product and stick them…
Amy Hoy is a big proponent of bootstrapping. Her 30x500 class seems to rock (according to the sample materials she has out there), and she has some choice words on the subject: http://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long...
This article brings up a good point: if you just found some super-cool free web application that you love? Odds are the only thing you're doing when you use it and recommend it to your friends is creating a nice resume for some large company to do a "talent acquisition" Large companies love this -- they find a couple of guys who are able to identify and engage audiences and then they kill their product and stick them…
So few people in the startup ecosystem sit down and think hard, "Where WILL we make our money? What do we REALLY have to sell?" So many assume that they will get bought because "they have a great product" or "they are the best" or "they have traction," but honestly, that's not even why most bigco's acquire startups. As you pointed out.[1]
This is not a disease of startups alone, of course. Most employees never sit down and ask themselves how & where they create value for their employer, much less how much, and whether they're then earning too little or too much. They just stab around in the dark for a number they think they deserve.
But when an employee gets the value equation wrong, worst case scenario is he/she loses a job. A whole company, product, ecosystem doesn't go down the tubes.
(Sidebar: It really warms my little bootstrapping heart to see this becoming a serious discussion topic lately!)
[1] There are other factors I'd add -- sometimes, it seems like a bigco buys a startup because they have too much M&A budget and simply want to fill a slot, check a genre off their list. "Can't buy Twitter? OK, buy Jaiku and call it a day. tick" Or the ever-popular "this little company annoys us so we'll buy it and kill it so we can stop thinking about it" technique, which sure as hell seems to happen far more than startup cheerleaders will admit.
This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…
"""This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers.""" No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down. (I shudder every f&%&^n time someone doesn't understand a generalization, and thinks that a few counter arguments disprove a statistical rule). """See Flickr…