3 ms·

How did you manage to fund this? Or was it just a side project your team worked on?

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I am not OP, but in the blog post the author mentions he works for Transloadit, which (after googling it as I wasn't previously familiar with it) is a service which handles lots of different file processing tasks for developers (e.g. image manipulation, audio/video encoding, virus scanning, etc.) If you are a service selling a product targeted towards developers, I can't think of better marketing than something like this, where tons of users will use it for free, but many users (like me) who hadn't previously heard about your core product will find out about it through this. EDIT: One thing to add about the marketing angle, another commenter mentioned that this was posted multiple times before reaching the front page, and some of the generic "Awesome! Will definitely try this!" comments here by low-karma users makes me think there is some astro-turfing going on. That said, I don't really mind it. Author created a useful tool, open sourced it, and I'm now glad I know about it. Kudos to him and if it helps more people become aware of his business (which obviously funded his creation of this open source tool) more power to him.
- kvz 7y ago
  Replied to the GP directly about how we find this, you pretty much nailed it! As for astroturfing: I am certainly guilty of self-promotion. When this post didn’t get traction, after a few days I thought maybe Show HN finds this interesting. In addition, my team of ~5 will have upvoted this post (although that probably works counter productive with HN's algorithms, I couldn’t/wouldn't stop them). Other than that we don’t deploy any schemes here, what you likely see is that, because we exploded on Reddit over the weekend, its users are posting it to HN too.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    Thanks for responding, and for creating this tool in the first place. Great work!
- dotancohen 7y ago
  Back end dev here, and long-time HN lurker. I've never heard of Uppy but I've just bookmarked it and I've very glad to now know of it. For the few times that I need to build some frontend, usually in HTML and Javascript, I need tools that do one thing well. Uppy looks like that type of tool. It is not some huge library like jQuery that I need to study for a week to use properly. It is for finding _actionable_ content like this that I come to HN. Thank you OP for posting.
kvz 7y ago
The company behind this is Transloadit. We provide tus & uppy for free, hoping that a fraction of our open source communities will use our hosted versions (of companion and tus) and optionally our commercial encoding service because they work well together. That could make our public coding efforts worthwhile financially. It’s a bit of a gamble. We’re believers/biased in part because we just enjoy working on oss, and in part because we’re quite a lean company and don’t need to make boatloads of money to make investors happy or anything (we’re bootstrapped since 2009, so no investors, and ramen profitable since 2012. Me and my cofounder are both devs and not in it to get yachts, but rather to have nice and rewarding work, basically) Whether it really also becomes a financial success remains to be seen. 3y of devtime isn’t cheap so it'll be a bit sad if there is no ROI at all, but we'll comfort ourselves with the thought that we'll be able to provide a better and more reliable uploader to Transloadit's existing encoding customers (because going open has made these projects better thanks to exposure to more minds and environments), and making them very happy, even if there’s 100x more people that don’t make us money.

I am not OP, but in the blog post the author mentions he works for Transloadit, which (after googling it as I wasn't previously familiar with it) is a service which handles lots of different file processing tasks for developers (e.g. image manipulation, audio/video encoding, virus scanning, etc.) If you are a service selling a product targeted towards developers, I can't think of better marketing than something like this, where tons of users will use it for free, but many users (like me) who hadn't previously heard about your core product will find out about it through this. EDIT: One thing to add about the marketing angle, another commenter mentioned that this was posted multiple times before reaching the front page, and some of the generic "Awesome! Will definitely try this!" comments here by low-karma users makes me think there is some astro-turfing going on. That said, I don't really mind it. Author created a useful tool, open sourced it, and I'm now glad I know about it. Kudos to him and if it helps more people become aware of his business (which obviously funded his creation of this open source tool) more power to him.

kvz 7y ago
Replied to the GP directly about how we find this, you pretty much nailed it! As for astroturfing: I am certainly guilty of self-promotion. When this post didn’t get traction, after a few days I thought maybe Show HN finds this interesting. In addition, my team of ~5 will have upvoted this post (although that probably works counter productive with HN's algorithms, I couldn’t/wouldn't stop them). Other than that we don’t deploy any schemes here, what you likely see is that, because we exploded on Reddit over the weekend, its users are posting it to HN too.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Thanks for responding, and for creating this tool in the first place. Great work!
dotancohen 7y ago
Back end dev here, and long-time HN lurker. I've never heard of Uppy but I've just bookmarked it and I've very glad to now know of it. For the few times that I need to build some frontend, usually in HTML and Javascript, I need tools that do one thing well. Uppy looks like that type of tool. It is not some huge library like jQuery that I need to study for a week to use properly. It is for finding _actionable_ content like this that I come to HN. Thank you OP for posting.

kvz 7y ago

The company behind this is Transloadit. We provide tus & uppy for free, hoping that a fraction of our open source communities will use our hosted versions (of companion and tus) and optionally our commercial encoding service because they work well together. That could make our public coding efforts worthwhile financially. It’s a bit of a gamble. We’re believers/biased in part because we just enjoy working on oss, and in part because we’re quite a lean company and don’t need to make boatloads of money to make investors happy or anything (we’re bootstrapped since 2009, so no investors, and ramen profitable since 2012. Me and my cofounder are both devs and not in it to get yachts, but rather to have nice and rewarding work, basically) Whether it really also becomes a financial success remains to be seen. 3y of devtime isn’t cheap so it'll be a bit sad if there is no ROI at all, but we'll comfort ourselves with the thought that we'll be able to provide a better and more reliable uploader to Transloadit's existing encoding customers (because going open has made these projects better thanks to exposure to more minds and environments), and making them very happy, even if there’s 100x more people that don’t make us money.