321–330 of 367 posts
Have you tried selling access to that data to the usual suspects ?
Hello. Blog post author and Exercism co-founder here. Thanks for all the comments, especially those kind supportive ones. I've replied to a few, but I thought it would making a couple of general points for context. 1. I feel something that's missed is that if Exercism just continues to help tens of thousands of people per month and has no-one working full-time on it in the future, that's not the end of the world. Our…
You can set the minimum to zero and a default above your target, and perhaps ask only after a short free trial period. I heard that it often yields better results than we would expect.
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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 t…
You could use the time value of money formula to convert between one-time prices and subscriptions. just multiply annual price by 30 to get forever price. So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront. And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription) It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360 up…
If you have that amount of users and you cant even pay 3(!) people, then your business model is massivly fci*g wrongly configured, Jesus!
You have that much traffic and you are unable to monetiz - i guess, this is because the "founder" is also the lead developer and the product genius.
You need some business guys to tune this!
Jesus, if this product fails, it will be a great example in whatever Stanford Business 101 course :-))
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They aren't. Look it up in the dictionary. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/business Someone's profession ( their "business") can certainly be working at a nonprofit, but that's because they are getting paid. The nonprofit organization itself is not a business. You might be looking for the word "corporation", which can include nonprofits.
I don't need to look it up because I've started two nonprofits and more than a dozen corporations. Nonprofits in the US literally are corporations, just with a different tax status. They need revenue that exceeds their costs. Many of them sell things. They can even turn a profit. Ikea operates as a nonprofit in the US.
Requiring more revenue than costs does not a business make. You starting a nonprofit does not give you special insight into the meaning of words. I am the treasurer on the board of a nonprofit. I have had to go through the books quarterly, confirm we’ve got enough cash for a year of runway, etc. The understanding of what nonprofits do is not the issue. This is a boring dispute over words (semantics).
Remember, you initiated this dispute over words when you made an argument “by definition” and you criticized KolmogorovCamp’s correct use of the distinction between nonprofits and businesses.
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It's also worth pointing out the Exercism isn't for coding newbies - it's for developers learning new languages. This often gets missed.
Shouldn't that make it even easier to monetize? I appreciate the resolve to keep things free for those who can't afford to pay, but a lot of your users are presumably actively employed making 6 figures. You could follow the Sublime Text model and basically have an honor system—if you're actively employed making more than $X, please pay us. If you're not, you're welcome to use it for free! The Tech Resume Inside Out […
Another thing. There are several podcasts who have a free feed and paid one. Sam Harris’ Making Sense comes to mind with their free feed and a paid one for full access to all content. But they understand not everyone can pay. If one is unable to pay, they can simply email to ask for a free annual membership.
Pay what you want albums on Bandcamp are another example of a sliding scale. Suggested price $10, but artists can define their minimum.
This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…
Or maybe they have and therefore know you can’t sustain a “business” without collecting money to pay for your expenses?
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The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users. I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way down ($1000/mo?). What is all this computing power going towards?
agreed. this can be optimized by the community. Sometimes, and I'm not saying this happened I am just saying that sometimes engineers have a strong desire to over-engineer and that might be costing money. Also want to add that maybe you can get approved for AWS for startups for example and migrate some compute there.
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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…
We're not shutting down :) But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.