5 ms·

I love Pinboard, but it's a one man operation. Maciej is extremely susceptible to get hit by a bus tomorrow, leaving me without my $9.23 and all of my bookmarks

by phillmv 15y ago

I love Pinboard, but it's a one man operation. Maciej is extremely susceptible to get hit by a bus tomorrow, leaving me without my $9.23 and all of my bookmarks. You're telling me that if someone offered you $1-5 mil to lead a team at insert huge tech company here you'd turn it down? Bitch, please. That chart is overall correct, but it's not like paying is suddenly going to be a panacea. I give flickr $25 a year, but I'm actively looking for replacements because it's obvious Yahoo!'s not gonna keep running it forever. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Sukotto 15y ago
I suggest you backup your bookmarks on a regular basis using the handy export page http://pinboard.in/export/ http://pinboard.in/export/ You might also want to tone down the snark.
- phillmv 15y ago
  What snark? I'm being totally straight here. I love Maciej and all of his body of work and I aim to give him many of my dollars in the future - but this is something I'm going to nitpick on. The reason why I feel comfortable using Pinboard on a day to day has nothing to do with the fact that I've paid for it because it's just as fragile and likely to suddenly disappear. It has a high "hit-by-a-bus" factor. It's because Maciej loudly proclaims his love for letting people export their data. That's it.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Startups disappearing one way or another is orders of magnitude more common per capita than bus pancakings.
  - jarek 15y ago
    This actually occurred to me and kinda bothered me as well. I saw an example during the FBI raid outage when the site was down in the morning on the east coast and there were no updates because he was still asleep on the west coast. I just saw a post on Twitter from him about this: http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714 http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714: "pals of mine have agreed to wind down the site in an orderly way and open-source the code if something happens to me" That being said, I would still keep fairly regularly back-ups. With export this great, there's no excuse (short of maybe getting monthly back-up dumps delivered by email).
perfunctory 15y ago
My conspiracy theory is that "get hit by a bus" theme was invented by the huge IT corporations so that they can sell two consultants instead of one to other corporations.
ahoyhere 15y ago
phillmv, our company is a 2-man operation (me + my husband, no less) plus freelancers. We run 2 SaaS products: http://letsfreckle.com http://letsfreckle.com http://charmhq.com http://charmhq.com Recently we fielded an acquisition offer for Freckle. Just the app - no strings, no nasty jump back to being an employee, etc. It was for half a million dollars. This gave us a lot to think about. Half a million wasn't enough. Was a million? Two? And the conclusion we came to was: no. Not worth it. A good little SaaS like ours is a kind of a sinecure. We don't have to work much on Freckle at all and it keeps chugging along earning more and more every month. (And the more we work on it, the faster it grows. It's a choice we can make on a month by month basis.) It would be damn foolish to sell it. It was fun to think about. What would we do with a million dollars? But the fact is, within 3.5 or so years, Freckle would have brought in that much revenue anyway. And then it would KEEP bringing in more, forever. I would definitely NOT take a $5 million offer if I had to be an employee. I bet Maciej wouldn't either.
- phillmv 15y ago
  >But the fact is, within 3.5 or so years, Freckle would have brought in that much revenue anyway. And then it would KEEP bringing in more, forever. So… straight up your expected value was higher than the offered acquisition price ;). If they offered you more revenue than you expected to make in 10 years, instead of 3.5, you might rethink the offer. Different strokes for different folks. Maybe in 3.5 years you'll be tired of that product in particular and you'll be looking for a better exit, etc, etc. Maybe the employee position is really sweet. You never know how your own life changes.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    At its current run rate, 10 years would be $2.5 mil. Except it's growing. I expect it to be earning $500k/yr run rate within 24 mos. And like I said, we could leave it alone and it would still continue to grow. There have been times, while we were still consulting, where we completely abandoned it for months (didn't even answer support emails) and it just chugged along. These days when we're not adding features, we spend maybe 1 day a week on it, max. And we're adding features because I have big ambitions. We could just let it be and it would still earn very nicely. When you get to the point of looking at $500k/yr of gross revenue forever, when would it make sense to give that up? We could hire a full-time support person and let them handle it and still have about $400k net (taxable) left over after other expenses, basically forever. Doing nothing. We could take $5 million but there's pretty much no way we'd get $400k of interest off it each year. As for the employment offer being really sweet… there couldn't possibly be a job sweeter than what I've already got.

by phillmv 15y ago

Sukotto 15y ago

I suggest you backup your bookmarks on a regular basis using the handy export page http://pinboard.in/export/ http://pinboard.in/export/ You might also want to tone down the snark.

phillmv 15y ago
What snark? I'm being totally straight here. I love Maciej and all of his body of work and I aim to give him many of my dollars in the future - but this is something I'm going to nitpick on. The reason why I feel comfortable using Pinboard on a day to day has nothing to do with the fact that I've paid for it because it's just as fragile and likely to suddenly disappear. It has a high "hit-by-a-bus" factor. It's because Maciej loudly proclaims his love for letting people export their data. That's it.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Startups disappearing one way or another is orders of magnitude more common per capita than bus pancakings.
- jarek 15y ago
  This actually occurred to me and kinda bothered me as well. I saw an example during the FBI raid outage when the site was down in the morning on the east coast and there were no updates because he was still asleep on the west coast. I just saw a post on Twitter from him about this: http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714 http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714: "pals of mine have agreed to wind down the site in an orderly way and open-source the code if something happens to me" That being said, I would still keep fairly regularly back-ups. With export this great, there's no excuse (short of maybe getting monthly back-up dumps delivered by email).

perfunctory 15y ago

My conspiracy theory is that "get hit by a bus" theme was invented by the huge IT corporations so that they can sell two consultants instead of one to other corporations.

ahoyhere 15y ago

phillmv, our company is a 2-man operation (me + my husband, no less) plus freelancers. We run 2 SaaS products: http://letsfreckle.com http://letsfreckle.com http://charmhq.com http://charmhq.com Recently we fielded an acquisition offer for Freckle. Just the app - no strings, no nasty jump back to being an employee, etc. It was for half a million dollars. This gave us a lot to think about. Half a million wasn't enough. Was a million? Two? And the conclusion we came to was: no. Not worth it. A good little SaaS like ours is a kind of a sinecure. We don't have to work much on Freckle at all and it keeps chugging along earning more and more every month. (And the more we work on it, the faster it grows. It's a choice we can make on a month by month basis.) It would be damn foolish to sell it. It was fun to think about. What would we do with a million dollars? But the fact is, within 3.5 or so years, Freckle would have brought in that much revenue anyway. And then it would KEEP bringing in more, forever. I would definitely NOT take a $5 million offer if I had to be an employee. I bet Maciej wouldn't either.

phillmv 15y ago
>But the fact is, within 3.5 or so years, Freckle would have brought in that much revenue anyway. And then it would KEEP bringing in more, forever. So… straight up your expected value was higher than the offered acquisition price ;). If they offered you more revenue than you expected to make in 10 years, instead of 3.5, you might rethink the offer. Different strokes for different folks. Maybe in 3.5 years you'll be tired of that product in particular and you'll be looking for a better exit, etc, etc. Maybe the employee position is really sweet. You never know how your own life changes.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  At its current run rate, 10 years would be $2.5 mil. Except it's growing. I expect it to be earning $500k/yr run rate within 24 mos. And like I said, we could leave it alone and it would still continue to grow. There have been times, while we were still consulting, where we completely abandoned it for months (didn't even answer support emails) and it just chugged along. These days when we're not adding features, we spend maybe 1 day a week on it, max. And we're adding features because I have big ambitions. We could just let it be and it would still earn very nicely. When you get to the point of looking at $500k/yr of gross revenue forever, when would it make sense to give that up? We could hire a full-time support person and let them handle it and still have about $400k net (taxable) left over after other expenses, basically forever. Doing nothing. We could take $5 million but there's pretty much no way we'd get $400k of interest off it each year. As for the employment offer being really sweet… there couldn't possibly be a job sweeter than what I've already got.