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Session is shutting down in 90 days

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Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#161

Post by gbalduzzi »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #152
coldpie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you did actually have a business plan, even if it was informal & just in your head. Something like "based on my experience in this line of work, I can charge about $X for Y service, if I get Z sales at that price, it's a viable business, otherwise I'll try to do ABC instead." It's light on details, but that's still a business plan, you had a plan to bring income in. That's fine. Not having a business plan l…

> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time. This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds l…

> I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence

yes, their business plans was always to engage a lot of users losing VC money until you are a platform with enough moat to add monetization. It was the plan all along

It is the plan for plenty of startups: when it works you become a tech giant, otherwise you fail and no one knows you

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#162

Post by Garlef »

833 wrote: post #30

Not sure why it's always a binary: either give us $1M or we shut down. Vast majority of products and services can continue on or near zero, with slow or zero velocity. Really, you can't fire half the team if you have to and keep operating? 1.75M MAU requires very small infrastructure.

Maybe it's a binary choice for the people who have to maintain it?

You can scale down money.

But you can't scale down commitment arbitrarily.

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#163

Post by Dylan16807 »

recursive wrote: post #141
sph wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair early, fail fast is a cornerstone of startup culture

That's not what Session is doing. They're dragging it out with a plea for donations to cover operating expenses.

I don't see the issue.

Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing.

This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#164

Post by esskay »

roryirvine wrote: post #76
esskay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but Londons known for being high wages. Now change that location to Cornwall or the North of England and watch it get almost cut in half.

Manchester is only about 10% below London, other cities along the M62 are about 15% below according to the salary benchmarking data I've seen. The bigger difference is more in the number and type of available roles. That salary would be above the median for most perm senior dev positions in London, but still well within the usual range for established tech companies and well-funded startups.

You went from picking the highest salary city...to the second highest paying city. You get how that comes across right?

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#165

Post by recursive »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #163
recursive wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what Session is doing. They're dragging it out with a plea for donations to cover operating expenses.

I don't see the issue. Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing. This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?

I don't see an issue either. I never really fully bought into moving fast and breaking things.

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#166

Post by kritiko »

coldpie wrote: post #156
anonymous908213 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time. This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds l…

Those are actually all pretty good examples of what I'm talking about, yeah. Investment money is not income, it is debt. It has to be paid back some time, or else your business will close. So the users who came to depend on the business will get boned when the business either closes or drastically changes as they find a business model. OpenAI, for example, is not profitable as far as I know. I think the users they ha…

Investment money is not debt. Equity and debt are different things.

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#167

Post by doctorpangloss »

ergocoder wrote: post #160
doctorpangloss wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inauthentic activity benefits from privacy though. Inauthentic activity is a primary use case of ChatGPT, which is way more successful than anything you've ever made. Do you think kids using ChatGPT to cheat on homework would care if their chats were "private" but educators could check if submitted essays matched generated content? Uh, yes. So privacy isn't as simple of an idea as you think it is, and is certainly ex…

It's a telling that you picked an example where one user could access another user's private info in an unauthorized way. No famous app does that. When I say privacy, I mean supporting the company promises a stronger privacy mechanism e.g. run locally, e2e encryption where the company itself cannot access your private info. This is the case for Session. It turns out most users are okay with you promising not to use/a…

"When I say privacy, I mean everything that makes me right, and everything that makes you wrong."

"No no, that's not what I mean. I mean, privacy is this only, specifically this set of technologies applied to this very specific set of products, and nothing else. Whatever definition will allow me to make this conversation as uninteresting as possible."

Look, I guess my point is, privacy is complicated. In my example, I suppose OpenAI could authorize access to something. They already do, for training. Right? And in some sense, something valuable leaks from one users' data to another. It is still privacy when access to your data is limited in some important way from other people, even when you (or a lot of people, or other people) could benefit from such access. The biggest apps in the world have very, very complicated privacy stories.

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#168

Post by roryirvine »

esskay wrote: post #164
roryirvine wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manchester is only about 10% below London, other cities along the M62 are about 15% below according to the salary benchmarking data I've seen. The bigger difference is more in the number and type of available roles. That salary would be above the median for most perm senior dev positions in London, but still well within the usual range for established tech companies and well-funded startups.

You went from picking the highest salary city...to the second highest paying city. You get how that comes across right?

Most of the rest of the north is similar. Darlington's the main outlier, since it's dominated by the public sector.

And yes, a senior dev will be on half that in the public sector outside London - but only if you exclude the pension.

I don't have figures for anywhere in Cornwall. Is there actually much of a tech industry there?

Re: Session is shutting down in 90 days

#169

Post by Dylan16807 »

recursive wrote: post #165
Dylan16807 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the issue. Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing. This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?

I don't see an issue either. I never really fully bought into moving fast and breaking things.

I'll rephrase. I don't see what's "dragging it out" about what they're doing.
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