3 ms·

1. The price is a barrier of entry for me. But that could just be my scrappy upbringing of trying to hunt up free stuff, before spending a dime. 2. Is there a

1. The price is a barrier of entry for me. But that could just be my scrappy upbringing of trying to hunt up free stuff, before spending a dime. 2. Is there a deeper plan to this? Any potential revenue models besides monthly subscriptions? Any future feature upgrades that would make this a unique value-proposition for users? If not, it would not take much for someone to build a similar service, have it available for free, and kll your product.

extantproject 16y ago
I thoroughly understand scouring the Internet for free stuff before even contemplating paying; I tried on the order of 50 free and paid list apps before deciding to build Atombox. I didn't find one I liked, so I built one that I do -- one that I would pay for. We are not dead-set on any one way to make revenue. We have some other ideas, but we decided to try the subscription bit. There are countless free and paid list apps out there already. Many of them overdo it on the features, don't use SSL, don't have keyboard shortcuts, and so on. We've tried to take out everything that isn't absolutely necessary and we will give you one-on-one support. I don't mind if all the others make money too -- all I need is enough revenue to pay myself and my co-founder salary and pay for the servers.
mahmud 16y ago
$5/mo is not a barrier for entry into anything. Their alternative to make any dime would be to feed your text to a contextual targeting engine and serve you ads. You know how long it takes to make anything from that? No less than 100k users; for that many users, at 10 posts each user, and each post about 100bytes, they're looking at just 1GB of text a month. A whole text mining engine, developed/integrated by 1-2 developers over 1-6 months, just to handle 1GB/mo :-( How many of those posts are read more than once? How many are shared? How many are publicly visible? Even if you categorized the posts by a targetable "vertical", you will have about ~50 posts per vertical, and those 50 are viewed by no more than 50 people, a few times. In other words, not fucking worth it. For this to be sustainable by advertising they will have to make the posts public, interlinked (i.e. structured in some manner, via a social-graph maybe?) and most importantly viral content that others will seek, share and return to. I have never seen a TODO list or a shopping list that was either viral, applicable to more than one person, or for that matter publicly shared. So let them charge $5/mo, and let those who can afford it use the service. Developers don't need to go cheap and price themselves down to homelessness.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- extantproject 16y ago
  Right: we are not interested in trying to make money using advertising; we intend to make money by charging for a service that we would pay.
  - extantproject 16y ago
    ... that we would pay for ourselves.
- richtofen 16y ago
  I understand the impeccable logic behind not building an advertising driven model. I just wonder about the magnitude of the 'problem'[recording ThingsToDo], and the cost of the 'solution'[$5/mo]. I would be very curious to see if this sustains the business [founder salaries and server costs]. Regardless, one wishes success to the project.
  - extantproject 16y ago
    Thanks!
  - mahmud 16y ago
    I am GTD practitioner and use Emacs' org-mode for it. If you can write an Emacs Lisp library that allows me to sync my Orgs with Redmine, I will happily pay $5/mo for it. If these guys can make a web-based Org-mode, I would pay for it too. Five bucks is nothing, it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines.
    - extantproject 16y ago
      "it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines" This was one of my core frustrations when I started searching for a list system. I wanted all of my "augmented memory" in one place so that I didn't have to deal with multiple copies of the same thing and having to keep it all in sync. I also wanted to be able to access everything from any box. Thanks for your comment! Oh: and I hear 'ya about org-mode + redmine syncing. ;)

extantproject 16y ago

I thoroughly understand scouring the Internet for free stuff before even contemplating paying; I tried on the order of 50 free and paid list apps before deciding to build Atombox. I didn't find one I liked, so I built one that I do -- one that I would pay for. We are not dead-set on any one way to make revenue. We have some other ideas, but we decided to try the subscription bit. There are countless free and paid list apps out there already. Many of them overdo it on the features, don't use SSL, don't have keyboard shortcuts, and so on. We've tried to take out everything that isn't absolutely necessary and we will give you one-on-one support. I don't mind if all the others make money too -- all I need is enough revenue to pay myself and my co-founder salary and pay for the servers.

mahmud 16y ago

$5/mo is not a barrier for entry into anything. Their alternative to make any dime would be to feed your text to a contextual targeting engine and serve you ads. You know how long it takes to make anything from that? No less than 100k users; for that many users, at 10 posts each user, and each post about 100bytes, they're looking at just 1GB of text a month. A whole text mining engine, developed/integrated by 1-2 developers over 1-6 months, just to handle 1GB/mo :-( How many of those posts are read more than once? How many are shared? How many are publicly visible? Even if you categorized the posts by a targetable "vertical", you will have about ~50 posts per vertical, and those 50 are viewed by no more than 50 people, a few times. In other words, not fucking worth it. For this to be sustainable by advertising they will have to make the posts public, interlinked (i.e. structured in some manner, via a social-graph maybe?) and most importantly viral content that others will seek, share and return to. I have never seen a TODO list or a shopping list that was either viral, applicable to more than one person, or for that matter publicly shared. So let them charge $5/mo, and let those who can afford it use the service. Developers don't need to go cheap and price themselves down to homelessness.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
extantproject 16y ago
Right: we are not interested in trying to make money using advertising; we intend to make money by charging for a service that we would pay.
- extantproject 16y ago
  ... that we would pay for ourselves.
richtofen 16y ago
I understand the impeccable logic behind not building an advertising driven model. I just wonder about the magnitude of the 'problem'[recording ThingsToDo], and the cost of the 'solution'[$5/mo]. I would be very curious to see if this sustains the business [founder salaries and server costs]. Regardless, one wishes success to the project.
- extantproject 16y ago
  Thanks!
- mahmud 16y ago
  I am GTD practitioner and use Emacs' org-mode for it. If you can write an Emacs Lisp library that allows me to sync my Orgs with Redmine, I will happily pay $5/mo for it. If these guys can make a web-based Org-mode, I would pay for it too. Five bucks is nothing, it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines.
  - extantproject 16y ago
    "it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines" This was one of my core frustrations when I started searching for a list system. I wanted all of my "augmented memory" in one place so that I didn't have to deal with multiple copies of the same thing and having to keep it all in sync. I also wanted to be able to access everything from any box. Thanks for your comment! Oh: and I hear 'ya about org-mode + redmine syncing. ;)