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Anatomy of a Crushing
- maguay 16y agoGreat read, and I've personally used Pinboard more than I ever would have thought. Best small web purchase ever!
- javanix 16y agoThanks for posting this. Easily the most interesting sysadmin-gone-right I've ever read, and a type of article I'd love to see more of on HN.
- bgraves 16y agoPosted under "Things that went well": We charged money for a good or service I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn't involve repackaging them as a product. If Pinboard were not a paid service, we could not have stayed up on December 16, and I would have been forced to either seek outside funding or close signups. Instead, I was immediately able to hire contractors, add hardware, and put money in the bank against further development.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- cschmidt 16y agoPinboard has a slowly increasing price as more users join. It was only $4.21 the day I signed up, and is now up to $9.25. I'm really glad I joined before the onslaught. :-)
- mkinsella 16y agoWith the signup fee currently at $9.25 and a pricing scheme of fee = (number of users * $0.001) that means there are currently approximately 9250 registered users. Who remembers calculus and can calculate how much revenue they have generated, assuming their signup fee started at $0.01?
- idlewords 16y agoThe pricing scheme is (number of users * $0.001 * C) where C is a multiplier that has changed with time. On top of that a significant portion of total revenue comes from archival accounts. This urge to reverse-engineer our total number of users when I actually share that information in the post baffles me.
- mkinsella 16y agoReverse-engineering is much more fun
- Stormbringer 16y ago"where C is a multiplier that has changed with time" Well, there's your bug :D
- sam 16y agoAssuming the fee as a function of users is linear and started at zero, the average user is paying 1/2 of the current price. So if the current price is $9.25, the average user is paying $4.625 per month. So they have made 9250*$4.625 = $42,781.25.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pnathan 16y agoThat's a really interesting pricing model. I should rummage around and see if he's mentioned why he chose that.
- idlewords 16y agoI got the idea from joshu. I wanted a gatekeeping fee for spam prevention but had trouble figuring out what to charge. He suggested a monotonically increasing signup fee.
- isnotchicago 16y agoAre you increasing the rates for Archival accounts, too, or just the Basic?
- idlewords 16y agoArchiving has always cost $25/year, and will stay that way. Only the signup fee goes up. The practical result is that the upgrade becomes progressively cheaper (since the signup fee is deductible from the first year's subscription)
- reeses 16y agoArchiving is the best deal around. $25 and I have 1.25GB of my past ten years of bookmarks saved. (Minus a few hundred dead links from the early days of del.icio.us.) I bookmark so I can look at something later, and the unpredictable perishability of the web defeats that purpose. Archiving snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. :-) I would like to see tag hierarchies à la del.icio.us, if you were bored and wanted to implement them.
- ohashi 16y agoAt some point you're losing more potential users than you're gaining because the price has gone too high. Do you think about that? How will you handle it?
- Vivtek 16y agoMoney quote: Of course, had bedbugs been found in the Delicious offices, our server would have been doomed. This is excellent writing!
- zeemonkee 16y ago"" This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one's app like a high-level character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty "application stack"." Excellent article, giving balance to current "best practice" thinking.
- ericd 16y agoYeah, it's great to see someone using a couple dedicated servers instead of a massively parallel web of EC2 servers and all the overhead that comes with it for something that really shouldn't need it.
- kawera 16y agoIt was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when buying a new car. Much like people complaining about the price of a gorgeous $2.99 iOS app while ordering a $6 coffee.
- TillE 16y agoBut the coffee is coffee. You know what you're getting. That $3 iOS app or $6 web service may or may not be entirely useless to you; it's quite difficult to know. I mean, it's easy to make sarcastic quips about the mentality. But there are good, clear reasons why it exists. And if you understand them, maybe you can do something about it - make it very clear exactly what your app does, include informative screenshots, offer a demo version, make payment easy, etc.
- loire280 16y agoIf it's an app that is supposed to be useful, it may very likely be worth $15 to you. A game that you enjoy for a few hours has already beaten a movie rental in value. Most users have, on average, gotten more than their money's worth on their app purchases.
- GFischer 16y agoI can get a ticket for a movie for U$ 4 in my country (Uruguay), yet there's no such price discrimination for games - it's the US retail price or the highway. Web/app pricing usually doesn't take into consideration the 3rd world (plus, the lack of availability of international credit cards or other easy purchase options, coupled with the attractiveness of piracy and low wages, makes selling stuff here a tricky proposition).
- heri0n 16y agoEven if you are from a 3rd world, if you can afford a smartphone worth several hundred dollars wouldn't you be able to afford a 99c app?
- brown9-2 16y agoAnyone know what tool is generating these very-pretty load graphs?
- idlewords 16y agoMicrosoft Excel 2004
- code_duck 16y agoThat's great - you never know when your competition can unroll a red carpet for you. Also, apachetop. How did I not know about this?
- rimantas 16y agoI lived in constant fear of forgetting a WHERE clause. For those in constant fear: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-tips.html#safe-updates http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-tips.html#safe-...
- idlewords 16y agoHa, I half-remembered this existing and tried to Google my way to it, but to no avail. Thanks so much for the pointer!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jtbigwoo 16y agoIn a huge database, even a SELECT with no WHERE clause can tie up considerable resources.
- dools 16y agoI always write my WHERE clauses first whenever I do anything on a live dataset.
- shii 16y agoIt's funny because I bookmarked this on pinboard.in
- 16y ago
- CountSessine 16y agoBut now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help. Jeez - who keeps hiring this guy? I think we had him or his brother at the next to last company I worked at.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoI really enjoyed this article in a way that I enjoy so few like it. It had just enough detail in the right places while being a really fun read. And thanks for mentioning apachetop -- I somehow wasn't aware of it, and as one of my hosting customers is expecting 6 digits of page views over the course of a couple of hours tonight, it now has a terminal window all to itself.
- xbryanx 16y agoI agree (on apachetop). I wish it were easier to discover essential tool like this beyond post-mortems. This will be a lifesaver in the future.
- erickhill 16y ago"And a final, special shout-out goes to my favorite company in the world, Yahoo. I can't wait to see what you guys think of next!" Seriously - you should send Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions a bouquet of flowers. One of the best posts I've read on HN in a long time, and I'm not even a sys admin. It was compelling, informative and funny - nice job!
- SwellJoe 16y agoWhat I think is sort of interesting is the difference in what makes a small company happy and what can satisfy a behemoth like Yahoo. This was an epic day in the life of Pinboard, and possibly took them from making ramen money into maybe pizza and beer money. For Yahoo, signing up a few thousand users at 6 bucks a pop is possibly not worth speaking of, much less devoting a team of developers, designers, marketers, system administrators, etc., to. I'm not saying Yahoo hasn't been making mistakes left and right for the past...I dunno, decade or so. Nor am I suggesting that delicious had to come to this ignominious end; had it been kept on target throughout the years since acquisition, this story probably wouldn't have happened this way. I'm just saying that this might not be an agonizing defeat for Yahoo. That's the cool thing about being a tiny company. You can do things that just aren't sensible from a business perspective when doing it on a larger scale (right now). A small company can completely ignore huge swaths of the market, for instance, and make one niche really happy and do nothing for the average user. Or, a small company can come in with a just the basics product that's simply easier to use than the big, complicated, product that's been in development for a decade or two. These are freedoms big companies simply don't have (as is the freedom to make thousands rather than millions on your primary product).
- dasil003 16y agoI hear what you're saying; this really isn't an agonizing defeat for Yahoo because Delicious was useless to them to begin with, however it's undeniable that the Delicious episode was a serious PR fuckup. It is a direct reflection of their floundering culture that A) the brass puts this in a major presentation when they are hoping to sell it (if indeed that was the case as they later claimed) and B) the employees are so demoralized that they are instantly leaking this presentation. Regardless of whether Delicious has any value to them, the last thing they want to do is forcibly drive away their user base. All that said though, this is a nice windfall for Pinboard, and I'm super happy for them. The positive karma there outweighs the negative karma to Yahoo, which isn't really significant because it's just one piece of their larger ongoing failures, and I can't really think of a better use of a small failure than to make a company like Pinboard's year.
- iancanderson 16y agoThis is one of the best reads I've had in a while on a tech blog.
- mise 16y agoHe was paying something like $500/month for the servers, right? Were the two hosted projects worth that monthly spend? In retrospect, of course it was, but maybe not on a month-to-month basis.
- DuncanIdaho 16y agoI find it quite surprising how little users pinboard actually got overall. But on the other hand - most of them are premium customers. Maciej I'm curious is this endeavour profitable for you? I understand the point of an itch that needs to be scratched and all. But still I'm curious - I find the service excellent (I'm a devout customer) but for all the resource intensiveness that your service requires to offer caching and search and the time sunk into implementation and maintaining, well I find the fee kinda low (on a over thumb estimate that is). Are there any other ways you are monetizing this? Since all those bookmarks are true "human powered search engine"?
- jonknee 16y agoYou have to pay to sign up (right now it's $9.25 but it increases steadily), so it's not too surprising that they got a relatively modest registration bounce. The money adds up quickly though.
- tnorthcutt 16y agoWe charged money for a good or service I know this one is controversial How unfortunate that this should be the case.