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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#851

Post by jhugo »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #269
bogwog wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all. Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situati…

Yeah, Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour. This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to of…

It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#852

Post by jhugo »

shmatt wrote: post #582
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing…

His app icon was showcased front and center at the WWDC keynote, something I always thought was bought with money, for (I assume) free. It has tons of users including paying users. I have a very hard time imagining being able to sell the app right now for less than 10 figures. All this fight has shown me is that people will gladly pay for this app monthly If he's leaving all that on the table out of spite, well thats…

As he mentions in the post, the main issue is the 30-day timeframe to completely rethink the business model of the app and move enough users over to paying subscriptions to not go bankrupt when the first API access bill comes in. The suggested API fees also seem quite unrealistic and it's unclear whether enough users would be willing to pay the necessary monthly fees to cover them.

Reddit's actions here make it pretty clear that they just want the app (all third-party apps) to shut down — if they actually wanted a solution they could easily lower the pricing to something more realistic and/or give a slightly longer transition period.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#853

Post by Aeolun »

melvinmelih wrote: post #548
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing…

I genuinely don't understand the "pay me 10 million to save half on 20 million of costs" negotiation tactic... if they wanted to save money, why wouldn't they just shut down the API access?

20 million/year is how much the Apollo users would bring in when served ads (the opportunity costs).

Reddit pays Apollo 10M, starts serving their ads in the app, and now rakes in 20M/year without any extra effort.

Conversely, now they need to convince all the angry users of Apollo to come back to use their shitty website/app, something that will never happen. A lot of people that aren’t even using Apollo are going to be angry at the mistreatment and leave the site altogether. On the whole it’s quite likely that Reddit’s losses will amount to more than the 10M they’d have to pay once to get a ton of money in the future.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#854

Post by kats »

Exuma wrote: post #233

What did everyone think of that call? I'm not a client-facing person (a developer) so I might have been tongue in cheek myself as well. Not sure how any of that sounded threatening though...

He 1000% was threatening them. He asked for 10 million dollars to go away quietly, meaning not use his leverage on reddit (who all just took at face value that he's a poor victim). They didn't accept so now he's selectively releasing his secret phone recording and being very aggressive.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#855

Post by prawn »

shmatt wrote: post #582
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing…

His app icon was showcased front and center at the WWDC keynote, something I always thought was bought with money, for (I assume) free. It has tons of users including paying users. I have a very hard time imagining being able to sell the app right now for less than 10 figures. All this fight has shown me is that people will gladly pay for this app monthly If he's leaving all that on the table out of spite, well thats…

When our app has been featured in WWDC moments, it's at the discretion of Apple. I don't believe that it's paid, but more Apple choosing what they think are quality examples of apps to motivate developers.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#856

Post by ryanSrich »

apozem wrote: post #248
duckfruit wrote: post #39

This makes me indescribably sad. Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These…

My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.

I have no idea why, but I can only stand to use reddit in "old" mode. Even on mobile. It's completely 100% unusable in any other format. I've tried to use their app and standard mobile website, but I can't make heads or tails of the hierarchy of content.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#857

Post by Aeolun »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74

I'm not a user of Apollo, and honestly have been perfectly fine using old.reddit.com on both mobile and desktop. That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that,…

It’s why I like working for privately owned companies. They’re mostly about enriching the owner, but for that to happen optimally the company has to actually be functional.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#858

Post by davemp »

bogwog wrote: post #254
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing…

Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all. Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situati…

Can’t really blame the guy. If I had banked $X00k-XM in my early thirties I wouldn’t be doing jobs I didn’t want to do either.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#859

Post by hnick »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #161
robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

Subreddits can't be destroyed, only made private, and then requested by someone else.

Can you script a mass-delete after privating (via API, while you still can)?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#860

Post by kats »

kaqvze wrote: post #535

Does anyone have the least bit of business experience? This is outrageous. I have not followed this at all but how can everyone here be so biased against Steve? If you listen to the call this Christian guy literally said: "if your opportunity cost is really $20 million, you cut me a cheque for $10 million dollars and we can both skip off into the sunset" A joke, seriously? Why on earth would you say this in what was…

He uses heart emojis on his reddit posts. It's so obvious how it's insincere.
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