Seven years ago, excercism helped me get through the children's cancer ward with my mind intact when my daughter got treated for lymphoma. Thank you
2M users but no money in the bank
301–310 of 367 posts
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#302Given that you are not making money on this at all, it would be wise to consider charging a small amount. If the number of users drops because of this, you still won't have lost any money. But those who choose to stay will help make this sustainable.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#303Maybe pull an OpenAI and go for profit?
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#304A shame. All the random garbage that comes out of things like ycombinator, promoted by 'visionaries' like graham, thiel and other bottom feeders, and something truly useful to the world like exercism is starving for funding :|
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Completely agree. In the end, it's all about the motivation and ethics of the owners. For an extereme example: OpenAI is "non-profit".
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything Wikipedia as an example of how unsuccessful a voluntary donation model is. 0.2% of people who use wikipedia donate to it. Unless you are doing tens of millions of unique views a month, it's probably not gonna be sustainable. People really hate paying for things. Even things they use and love.
Also it's a subtraction from the legitimacy bank account. It's well known that Wikipedia doesn't need those donations . Endless telethons for public television in America annoy 100 people for every one that donates. Despite that you see ads on public TV for the Archer Daniels Midland corporation all the time even though, allegedly, there is no advertising on public TV.
> It's well known that Wikipedia doesn't need those donations.
I disagree. Wikipedia is similar to Exercism on that count. A tiny fraction of expenses are hosting the encyclopedia. It's also necessary to pay people to program the software underlying MediaWiki.
People aren't bothering to edit anymore either. Search engine summaries, voice assistants, and now large-language models repackage information from Wikipedia in a way that discourages people from going to the website itself. Most low-hanging fruit is gone, and the standard of quality has increased.
There's a whole project dedicated to helping undergraduate students edit Wikipedia as a part of their coursework now. It's a great learning opportunity because a Wikipedia editor will check your sources more than the average TA. The flipside is that an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts isn't necessarily enough to write at a Wikipedia level, which is a problem.
These external factors are decimating the volunteer community and the visitor population. Spending on outreach, staffing, and grants to local affiliates is much costlier than having people wander onto Wikipedia and contribute, but that's no longer the era we live in.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#307My heart is in pain from reading this post - as everybody's who had a startup & encountered the "poor fit" argument. I particularly feel for you regarding the problem of being more generic than needed when people prefer smaller scope (happened to me a few times). I don't have a solution for you, and you probably tried a lot of prudent things. I assume you have already contacted people that buy into educational softwa…
What does the "poor fit" argument refer to?
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#308Congratulations 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…
>(Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $)
measuring success by how much people are willing to shift scarce resources in your direction is a perfectly good way to measure success. It's "weighted usage+reach". the remarkable effectiveness of markets in allocating resources this way is a huge achievement for civilization. I really had to scratch my head at their surprise that a non-profit oxymoron model, i mean, business model wasn't viable.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#309This is the problem with ed-techs. Nobody wants to pay. Those that do (Universities, schools) are also competing with the platforms to some degree.
It's hard to build a business model around education because the product succeeding removes the user's need for it in the first place.
Kinda like a dating app, where maximizing usage means not getting you hitched (too quickly).
One of my theses as an edtech founder is that the education can't be the core business model long term.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#310Founder mode can raise 1B with plain html page, but himself and investors always shy from tossing few mil at useful content sites it gonna later be scraping. It's not sad, it's really ... disgusting.