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Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
- rokhayakebe 16y agoYou guys beat me to it (launching something similar this week). Very nice, indeed.
- wdewind 16y agoCool. What is Posterous's business model?
- revorad 16y agoThey've now got a solid product and userbase. The business model could be any of advertising, affiliate marketing, lead generation, premium features, ecommerce.
- sbisker 16y agoTotally agreed. But which is it? The decision on any of those models, if not properly considered, could have impacts that reverberate through their product and userbase. Advertising, done wrong, could break their clean aesthetic. Affiliate marketing, done wrong, could hurt people's trust. You get the idea. The business model is a part of the design, in that it works in concert with it - and people are eager to see the fuller vision of posterous realized. That said, I agree. I think it's great that they're taking some time to see how their product evolves, especially when they seem to sincerely want to "change the game." One thing YC companies seem to do well is that they have the patience to take the time to explore those markets alongside their users, instead of dragging them into a business plan that detracts from how users want to use the product in their daily lives. EDIT: Whoops, this answers part of the question, from their FAQ: Yes, Posterous is enthusiastically a free service. Later, we'll be adding premium features we know you'll love, but there will always be a useful free version you can use.
- revorad 16y agoSachin's mentioned planned premium features in the past, so I think that's a good bet. They could also do one-off deals with big companies, like they once did with Coca-cola and Loopt recently did with Virgin. They've got a good brand and smart founders, I expect they will do just fine.
- sbisker 16y agoNeat, I didn't know about the Coca-cola deal. Which if you're as curious as I was, is described here: http://ycombinator.posterous.com/posterous-s08-jumps-on-the-revenue-wagon-sign http://ycombinator.posterous.com/posterous-s08-jumps-on-the-... It's great to see what companies can come up with. :) Thanks.
- jackowayed 16y agoHonestly, I startups often say "premium features" because that's something that users understand and aren't scared by. Posterous has raise $5M, so they really need at least a $40M exit, preferably bigger. Are they really going to make enough for that kind of exit from a small percentage of their users paying, say, $5-10/month for premium blogging features? Doubtful. I think their plan, as well as that of many other startups, is to grow as much as possible and then either find a way to monetize their large number of free users or get bought by a company that wants some combination of the users, the employees, and the technology. But the average user won't be reassured when seeing this in an FAQ: "It's free, what's the catch?" "We want to get as many users as possible while making no money, and then we'll find some way to either bring in revenue or sell the company" Users would worry that Posterous either will die one day when they run out of money or eventually realize they need to make money and ruin the product. But "you'll always be able to keep your same free product, but we'll add some even better features that cost money" isn't scary. This isn't unique to Posterous. I don't remember which startup there was, but I saw "premium features" on the FAQ of another startup and literally laughed out loud because I knew that the combination of the amount of funding they had raised and the small amount that most users would be willing to pay meant that that was a lie.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
- grok2 16y agoI think a good business model would be sell this either as a SaaS service or sell the server outright as software to enterprises. This model of running groups has minimal friction in maintaining records of team discussions (as opposed to setting up internal mailing lists) that will get archived in a central place instead of valuable discussion info hidden away in individual end-user inboxes.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoThis would have been more interesting and innovative a couple years ago, but now that everyone and their mother (and grandmother, and grandfather) are on Facebook, I think Facebook Groups is a fine solution that offers all the features listed here. I had this exact problem twice in the last month, and both times, I found that everyone in the two real-world groups I was trying to bring online was already on Facebook. Literally every single person out of maybe 50 people total, spanning age ranges from teenagers to folks in their late 50s. I found it much easier to get them to use it than it would have been if I had to explain this new posterous thing.
- bjtitus 16y agoAs far as I know, Facebook Groups still doesn't send media along in its email updates. While most everyone is on Facebook, many family members I know don't check it regularly enough to make it practical. Email is a different matter. I think Facebook definitely has the stronghold with familiarity, though. I'd expect their groups features to expand dramatically in 2011.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoBy default, you get emails in FB groups for each message and comment, just like Posterous, and you can respond via email to post new messages (each group has its own email address) or comments. You could interact with multiple groups without ever logging into FB (I know because I do :). I'm not sure about the media thing, though it's not really practical for video to attach the media...surely posterous doesn't do that either.
- radicaldreamer 16y agoIt's the little things that make all the difference imo. For example, while Facebook Groups does allow commenting by email, if you attach a picture to a reply, it doesn't appear in the group. Secondly, I don't see many small businesses or even teams within large companies using Facebook Groups to collaborate.
- emmett 16y agoBug: I already had a posterous account, and whenever I try to create a new group it just sends me in circles and breaks. :-(
- maxklein 16y agoI just tried it. It works well as a replacement for Google Wave - but it's nicer. Also, the emails means that there is instant notifications, which was a flaw that gwave had.
- scrrr 16y agoMaybe its the WikiLeaks debacle lately, but somehow my first thoughts were "cool, like that" and then "i cant use it, because i cant trust posterous with my data"..
- revorad 16y agoYou'll have to trust someone.
- scorpion032 16y agoIn this case, your email provider, everyone's email provider and posterous.
- sw1205 16y agoHow is this different to frid.ge or neetly.com?
- a4agarwal 16y agoThink of Posterous Groups more like an email list on steroids than a web based groups product. You can invite people by adding their email address to the group, and they dont have to sign up for anything to use the service. The service is fully functional as an email list, but better since it handles rich media well.
- Splines 16y agoTwo questions: - Can groups be members of other groups? - In gmail when I click "reply" to a mail sent to the group, it just goes back to the sender (there is a "Reply To" visible in the mail, but gmail isn't using it for some reason). Otherwise, neat stuff. Not everybody in my family is on Facebook, and others in the family are leery of using FB because of privacy issues (unintentional information sharing between friend circles).
- radicaldreamer 16y ago1. Absolutely, you can be a part of any combination of public and private groups that you like. 2. It should go to a custom email address and will function as a reply to the post. The sender's name is the author of post or reply in that notification.
- Groxx 16y agoI think you read 1 inside-out. The question was basically if groups can be nested inside groups.
- radicaldreamer 16y agoWhoops... well, then the answer to #1 is no, they can't.
- guynamedloren 16y agoSo let me get this straight. Your big pitch is "Sharing privately with groups is broken right now ... Multi-attachment, inbox-cluttering emails." And you're solving that problem (a few sentences later) with "Every time you post to the group, she'll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update." How exactly does that solve any inbox-clutter problems whatsoever? If anything, it seems like it'd create even more inbox clutter. Am I missing something here? Sending more emails results in less clutter?
- ph0rque 16y agoHmmm... is this slinkset's successor?
- sielskr 16y agoCan a person join an existing Posterous Group using only email?
- unicornporn 16y agoAnd when does this gang plan to make some money? I fail to see a business model taking form.
- kiranryali 16y agoWhy would someone use this over google groups?
- a4agarwal 16y agobetter member management (people don't have to create accounts); photos, video, audio, documents are all supported natively; web view is far superior. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
- mike-cardwell 16y agoI love the way you've made this work. However, it does not behave well with PGP signed emails. When a message is MIME/PGP signed, the attachment is stripped and dropped. When a message is signed inline, posterous corrupts the message leaving the header in place, but dropping the signature. If this is fixed, I am likely to use this service for some technical lists.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoYou have a tracking image embedded in the emails. It points at a redirector script which does no validation of the destination url. This is highly abusable. Example: http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.c...
- mike-cardwell 16y agoOuch. It looks like you've done this on purpose. If I send an email with a link to the list, the link in the email I get back bounces through r.posterous.com. This will be abused by spammers...
- mike-cardwell 16y agoOk. You have yet another open redirector here: http://posterous.com/logout?jumpto= http://posterous.com/logout?jumpto= Not good...
- a4agarwal 16y agoThanks, Mike. We're fixing this up right now.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoAnd yet it's still not fixed.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoIf I send a HTML email to a group which contains an iframe, an img tag, and an input field of type "image", all referencing a remote URL, the process of viewing the email in the posterous interface automatically causes the browser to fetch each of those resources. This is a privacy leak. You should remove references to these remote resources when displaying a message in the posterous web interface. You should then provide an option to "Load Remote Images". Much like most email clients do.
- krmmalik 16y agoGenuine question. How is this better than Yahoo Groups?
- fanf2 16y agoIf it doesn't require confirmation from group members, how do they stop spammers from abusing it?
- dvdt 16y agoWow I had the idea to do exactly this only a few days ago.