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Beeper acquired by Automattic

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#91

Post by ksherlock »

mvkel wrote: post #76
wokwokwok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper It certainly sounds like… Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and earl…

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

counterpoint: Tesla/Musk/Solar City

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#92

Post by erohead »

COGlory wrote: post #89
erohead wrote: post #36

Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

Congrats on the new position and future of Beeper. I think Automattic will be a great home and I've been impressed with what they've done with other projects as well. Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper? Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...

> Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?

Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#93

Post by PaulHoule »

mvkel wrote: post #76
wokwokwok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper It certainly sounds like… Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and earl…

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

From 2005 to the end Yahoo’s role in the SV ecosystem seemed to be the people who would buy any company if the founder had the right connections, for instance the son of a private equity lord who licensed a worthless patent from Stanford that Yahoo paid $100+ for.

It is a magical way to turn “anybody” into a successful founder or VC if they’ve got the right connections and in fact you can create both ex-nihilo in one transaction.

If you read the newspapers you’d never find out that 70% of acquisitions achieve their goals. A lot of that is you hear more about the ones that fail and not the ones that succeed. The ones that fail give many people the impression that there is nothing rational at all about how acquisitions happen in corporate America.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#94

Post by rchaud »

joenot443 wrote: post #38
rchaud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).

I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)

WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace.

Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#95

Post by paulryanrogers »

mvkel wrote: post #76
wokwokwok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper It certainly sounds like… Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and earl…

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

DD?

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#96

Post by ravetcofx »

BadHumans wrote: post #18

If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.

I've been pretty impressed with their Pocket Casts acquisition from NPR to date, they open sourced the apps which was a great bit of community service.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#97

Post by tithe »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #95
mvkel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this w…

DD?

Due Diligence

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#98

Post by mintplant »

Contortion wrote: post #72
markx2 wrote: post #57

"Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. " Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/ "Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future." Reminder: wordpress.com shares data with 851 other companies.

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

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#99

Post by xenospn »

jamesmunns wrote: post #13
xenospn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?

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.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#100

Post by gnicholas »

I find it interesting that so many people want to unify all their messages. For me, I like having different apps that I can check with different frequency. I am glad that I can get my iMessages immediately but that LinkedIn messages don't get delivered to me until I open the app/website. I have literally never had an issue where I didn't get a message in time because it was sent via the wrong platform. People who need to reach me urgently know how to do so.
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