281–290 of 310 posts
That's an acquisition price of $1,086/user, note that isn't active user! Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!
Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
> Exciting day for Beeper! Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of…
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Yeah, having all of your messaging in one place is amazing. Especially since they support a decent long tail of DM services as well.
I use iMessage, messenger/IG, WhatsApp, Snapchat and slack. Probably not much value for my specific use case.
My IM situation is only currently tolerable because all of my frequent contacts are either via WhatSapp or twitter DM.
Even having the handful you do would be enough to make -me- want to consolidate.
(this is not at all meant to be an argument that -you- should want it, but I think is at least a good case that there will be people out there in your -situation- that will)
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Yeah, my first response was going to be that the paid messaging app business model hasn't worked that entire time. But what we've learned from Whatsapp is that there may be other ways to monetize (Whatsapp Business). Still not an obvious bet IMO but you're right that owning the messaging layer is valuable.
These apps are a gateway drug onto the Matrix protocol thereby eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies like WhatsApp (Meta).
Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.
That's an acquisition price of $1,086/user, note that isn't active user! Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!
For once, they are probably not acquiring users but the tech & the brand (fighting with iMessage was a genius marketing move).
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Plus your messages will no longer be fully E2E encrypted. As per their FAQ (emphasis mine): "For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the bridge, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol." Directly underneath that they also say: "Using native end-to-end encrypted chat apps independe…
You can host the bridges yourself: https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager
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> Exciting day for Beeper! Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of…
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Shitty to whom, on a personal level? Tim Cook? People really aren't kidding when they say HN is the orange Macrumors, huh?
> at the direct expense and risk of a non-profit community built around it.
I don't know where you learned the definition, but iMessage is not a non-profit product. It's not even an open one.
How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?
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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
My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.
Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.