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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#221

Post by mlyle »

twojacobtwo wrote: post #185
madamelic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion. Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people inside of it. Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are profiting very healthily off of their work.

Non-profit simply tells people what the incentives/motivations are or are not. The average for-profit company can't be trusted/expected to do what's best for anyone outside the profit structure (e.g. users or the public at large). Of course you can have exceptions in either direction, but on average for-profit orgs will likely be willing to fuck over anyone else to increase profits - intentionally or not - because pr…

Unfortunately, in practice, this isn't really true.

It's a less powerful motivation, in that there are not shareholders who will benefit from growth.

But in practice, executives and managers end up making more, which provides an incentive for growth.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#222

Post by freedomben »

8bithero wrote: post #218

I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation. Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free…

Personally, I think this approach of asking for donations is the right move for a non-profit. Subscription fatigue is real and is becoming a major problem. I am now at the point where I will go without software I would absolutely pay for one time, but because it is a subscription I refuse.

I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire. They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations, but there are plenty that are.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#223

Post by ihid »

sealeck wrote: post #46
philipwhiuk wrote: post #23

> For the last few months, I've been working on a new educational product teaching coding fundamentals that I'm going to launch in 2025. 96% of people who try to learn coding give up - which I find unacceptable, so I'm aiming to change that. Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the side.

I think the tone of this comment is unnecessarily condemning (apologies if I am reading it incorrectly) – I can totally understand why someone who has worked for years on a non-profit business which has created a lot of value for people (I think exercism is pretty good software) might want to be able to at least pay themself.

Thanks, yeah. New product will hopefully mean I can keep funding and growing exercism. They're very synergistic and will support each other.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#224

Post by primitivesuave »

trcarney wrote: post #197

I just had an idea that is a shot in the dark but you could try cold calling large companies with complicated SDKs to see if they will pay you a large monthly fee in exchange for exercism hosting a tutorial they create for their SDK. You already have the sandbox and the support for the most popular languages. It may take some development to build out the feature but you probably wouldn't need too many to sign on to c…

This is a great idea, especially when you consider the untold millions that companies like Twilio and Stripe already spend on educating developers. Perhaps along with "language tracks" there could be "API tracks".

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#225

Post by Barrin92 »

dmurray wrote: post #202
insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

How does it not "poison the mission" if it means 99% of users drop the platform?

that's one percent more success at the mission than you have if you're forced to turn the servers off because you can't pay the bills. Money's to an organization what's oxygen is to a body, before you go and plan any missions you need to be able to sustain yourself.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#226

Post by ihid »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #17
benreesman wrote: post #15

Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.

Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website. Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.

I've replied to this further down. Exercism is a nonprofit - we have no shareholders. We've had many large organisations donate to us (including Mozilla and Google) who have vetted all this.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#227

Post by dboreham »

I haven't used this site but I did run a service a while ago that had 100K free users. All the talk here about not using AWS is bunk. Not needle moving. OP needs to bite the bullet and charge their customers. At least some of them, for something. Heck some of their traffic probably comes from bots. Bill them. Make a white label version and try to sell that to big customers. Actually the other way round: try to sell it then make it if they bite.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#228

Post by joker99 »

dustincoates wrote: post #126
stavros wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base. Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than…

They have a paid tier, called insiders, although you can also "pay" through helping other users on the site: https://exercism.org/insiders

Never knew they had this, signed up immediately :) Exercism is worthy of 120$ a year and worth its weight in gold. It has helped me learn Rust, Swift and Kotlin and I'll be forever greatful!

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#229

Post by pcthrowaway »

tptacek wrote: post #207
pcthrowaway wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you mean more ?

I just meant, you'd be paying these supposed engineers less than $90,000/yr.

Oh you're right, the salary the employee would be getting in this hypothetical would be less than the fully loaded cost.

So the person claiming you can get 2 "great" devs with 10 YoE for 90K/yr is effectively saying there are 2 "great" devs with 10 YoE somewhere in the world who are willing to work for like $35K/yr (or something in that realm less than 45K/yr).

I don't think the market has gotten that bad, but again, I'm not really paying attention to the job market right now.

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