You may want to try to sell this thing man.
Just Landed Is Shutting Down
31–40 of 144 posts
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#32Active users = check
Value delivered = check
Inability to develop profitable GTM plan = check
I didn't read about funding in the article, but outside of $ a VC or Angel will provide a network and path to solve GTM challenges AND get you in front of the right people for an exit.
I'm sure if this app called an Uber/Lyft timed to plane landing it could find a home...
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#33This cries out for Apple to support update pricing. However the likelihood of that every happening is less than giving the NSA a backdoor. Update pricing would make Apple money (not that it needs it) and change very little but the desire is zippo to bupkis to do it. This would allow smaller companies to survive. Oh well, doubtful it rises to the level of anyone caring.
Paid updates would be a disaster. Can you imagine giving every two-bit developer the power to say "this update costs $0.99" and all they did is change the font. Your phone would be a sea of shitty paid updates. Many customers would not update their apps, and the user base would become fragmented. Customers would become wary of buying apps for fear of being ripped off by endless updates. You may say "ah but the good d…
So just add one setting. Turn off paid updates.
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#34Earlier 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…
Apple supports in-app purchase of subscriptions, so you can still use the standard App-store tools to handle recurring billing.
Oh, right. My bad. Somehow I totally forgot about that!
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#35You may want to try to sell this thing man.
Exactly. The business is worth 5-figures, easily.
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#36Question about flight data and the middlemen:
Do these middlemen have to strike deals with the various airlines, or are they simply accessing public APIs that generally stink? What order of magnitude, cost wise, do these airlines charge in the deals? Could I, $random_guy, make a deal with $random_airline, for an amount that is sustainable without any special kind of funding?
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#37From the article: While the app was initially used primarily by individuals who made a few airport pickups per year, today Just Landed is increasingly used by professional limousine and taxi drivers, airline professionals, and travel companies. So they were seeing increasing use by commercial users. Sounds like a ripe opportunity to start charging for such access.
No kidding, this was the weirdest shutdown statement I've read in a while, "we found users who derive commercial benefit from using us... so we're shutting down"
Commercial people using your app vs commercial users willing to pay 500 times the current price are 2 very different things.
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#38This sucks for us long-term users of Just Landed. I want to congratulate John for making something people _clearly_ wanted. Apparently sometimes that's not enough...
This jumped out at me:
"...Just Landed has outlived several of the services that it originally depended on, and each time a service provider has disappeared..."
This statement refers to the less than 4 years old app, which speaks volumes about value proposition of for-subscription-cloud-based APIs. Just Landed is a relatively simple, focused app built by a small team, yet in this short time it has suffered several (!) hits from disrupted availability of the API providers.
How can one expect to build a big business based on considerably more complex software using such APIs?
Compare that to the pains Microsoft has historically gone through to keep ABI compatibility with decade-old systems. I even have doubts about long-term availability of half of AWS services.
Kudos to John for running Just Landed for so long.
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#39This cries out for Apple to support update pricing. However the likelihood of that every happening is less than giving the NSA a backdoor. Update pricing would make Apple money (not that it needs it) and change very little but the desire is zippo to bupkis to do it. This would allow smaller companies to survive. Oh well, doubtful it rises to the level of anyone caring.
Paid updates would be a disaster. Can you imagine giving every two-bit developer the power to say "this update costs $0.99" and all they did is change the font. Your phone would be a sea of shitty paid updates. Many customers would not update their apps, and the user base would become fragmented. Customers would become wary of buying apps for fear of being ripped off by endless updates. You may say "ah but the good d…
and the user base would become fragmented.
Is that a problem for anyone other than the app developer? It doesn't seem to be any loss to either the end user or to Apple for them to keep running Fart Simulator 2014 forever. If the app developers actually need all their users on the latest version, then they're incentivized not to charge for updates (or to do so in a reasonable fashion).
Re: Just Landed Is Shutting Down
#40Noooooo! I love Just Landed and my family and I all use it :(