12 ms·

Dear "Landlord"

325 points by vetler 15y ago

tgrass 15y ago
Is the De-Stijl Schroder house now an office?
- raganwald 15y ago
  No, it’s a museum. It just happens to be a favourite building of mine and an excellent example of making a complete break from convention, just like many start-ups :-)
markkanof 15y ago
So where in the world does this kind of thing happen? To me it sounds like a made up scenario and then an argument against the made up scenario. Could just be that it doesn't happen in the parts of the world that I have lived and worked though. UPDATE: Thanks for the clarification everyone. I guess I'm way too literal early in the morning.
- pragmatic 15y ago
  It's an analogy for "the super latest greatest startup web site" and how it's risky using it (aka moving in). You don't pay for it, so you don't have any claim as a tenant when they decide to cash out.
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  He's talking about startups getting acquired and then shutting down (see the last link of his post referencing Posterous).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- ajuc 15y ago
  It was analogy, not to be taken literaly. Ragenwald wanted to say that free services (webpages, applications, etc) provided by startups often ends up after a while, and people depending on them are left hanging.
- ValG 15y ago
  I could be wrong but I think this is a satire on what happened to Posterous, he's saying Posterous is the "landlord" and they built this "space" to work in for free; but they just did it with the intention of getting their name out there knowing that there would be an exit at some point. He feels betrayed b/c there was all of this trust built up and now they are closing down.
- PedroCandeias 15y ago
  Indeed. Maybe it's actually a metaphor for cool free apps and what happens when the startup behind them gets acquired?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ValG 15y ago
An interesting satire on what's happening in the tech world, however, I'd be hesitant to be quite as critical. In the end, the service is free, it's not something that has to be provided. You should enjoy it while it's there and appreciate it, not feel entitled to it. Is it a little bit of a dick move? Yeah, but then again, what would you do if you were in their position?
- telent 15y ago
  I don't think the issue is so much "what should they do now", because what they should do now is constrained by what they can do. The issue is "what should they have done in 2008?" - should they for example have said "please note that our current business model is not sustainable, and while you are welcome to enjoy it while it's here you are cautioned not to behave as though it will be here for ever"? Providing a limited, ephemeral, or best-effort service is a perfectly OK thing to do provided your service users know that's what you're doing and can (as raganwald says he has) tailor their behavour accordingly
  - ValG 15y ago
    Great point, but it's unbelievably difficult do carry something like that out practically. Who are the CEO's customers, the market the company is targeting, or the company's employees? I'd argue both, the CEO is the visionary and cheerleader for the staff, and also the public image for the customers. If you come out and say we are not sustainable, guess how many employees you'll have at the end of the week? Guess how many customers? After putting 100's or 1000's of hours into something, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to go that route
    - Drbble 15y ago
      This is where honesty has to be given its due. I expect A CEO to honestly state the max plausible downside and upside of their business, and to have a decent argument (which I take with a grain of salt) for why they expect the upside to happen. Then I make my own estimate, somewhere between the extremes, and act accordingly. The CEOs I respect (as employers, vendors, and investments) behave this way.
tptacek 15y ago
I think it's a little .----- and more than a little hyperbolic to suggest that Posterous wasn't a business, but rather just an exhibit for the team's portfolio. The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly. I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair. But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in? I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.
- raganwald 15y ago
  There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. I apologise if it comes across that way. I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site. FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood. The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan. So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.
  - mbateman 15y ago
    > There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended by the post, and I apologise if it comes across that way. > I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site. That sounds like (and certainly comes across far more strongly in the blog post as) a criticism. It sounds fairer the way it was put here than how you said it there. Not having a monetization strategy that involves charging customers is not coextensive with being a mere portfolio exhibit.
JoelMcCracken 15y ago
Took me a minute or so to figure what he was talking about. I am not sure what the greater message is, here. Was Posterous "evil" for selling themselves to Twitter? Or, should users generally beware any company that does not have a revenue? At what level of revenue should users stop worrying? Not saying that it is likely, but should users of Dropbox worry that Apple will acquire them? Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.
- raganwald 15y ago
  I think it’s a question of lock-in. If someone wants to give a free service away and there’s very little lock-in, great! If a new restaurant opens in my neighbourhood, maybe the owner gives away free lunches to all the people working nearby. Great, go have lunch. But if there’s a big lock-in, as users you have to do your due diligence (we used to jokingly call it “doing the dew”). Say there’s a service for managing software projects. Well, if I’m going to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars plus my career and reputation on a service, I want to ask a lot of questions, that’s natural. I’m actually cool with Posterous, I hope the folks behind it do really well.
  - JoelMcCracken 15y ago
    That makes sense. I realized just now that I sounded very critical of Posterous. I also hope they do very well. Posterous' "badness" is more of a matter of corporate moral personality. As a company develops, its leaders will have opportunities to make decisions which show their opinions on things. It doesn't surprise me when their future decisions also reflect those opinions. For a high-profile example: Remember when Google decided it was going to start censoring search results in China? At the time, it was huge, extremely surprising news. However, it also showed a change in corporate opinion. Given subsequent developments, you can "see" the change in corporate decisions.
brudgers 15y ago
Interesting metaphor. The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks. Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way: It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on Pocahontas was significantly better.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Celebration is also ongoing PR for the Disney mystique, like Google's autonomous car project.
edw519 15y ago
I use Posterous, Weebly, Hacker News, and twitter, and love them all. I don't pay a nickel to any of them and never will. I hope very much that they all last forever. But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds. <HN201203141055.txt> [UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]
- revorad 15y ago
  Wow, do you always copy+paste or download everything you write on the internets?
  - wladimir 15y ago
    There's the "It's all text" Firefox extension which might help here. It can open your favorite text editor for text areas. This makes it easier to save a backup copy (I guess you could change it to do this automatically), no copy/paste needed.
    - slug 15y ago
      That's a pretty neat extension, thanks! To make it work on my machine I had to follow this though: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/reviews/337255/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/...
  - edw519 15y ago
    Yes. I write everything in TextPad first, saving as I go with Control-S to the appropriate directory using the date & time in the file name. I like to work full screen in large letters and I love lime green on black. I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons). Seems like I'm the only one who has a record of anything because of my practice. I operate under the assumption that anything free will go away at some point. I plan on moving somewhere else with my data. Also, it's really easy to find anything on my hard disk. A little background: Years ago, I found my best friend from college and we started to exchange emails. I emailed him a trivia quiz with 20 questions. He later told me that he was laughing like crazy while he answered them for the next hour. His wife called him when he was on Question #19. By the time he returned, his computer had crashed and he lost everything. (This was obviously pre-Gmail.) Now we'll never know what he answered. I don't know what will be important later, so I'll never let anything like that ever happen to me.
dkrich 15y ago
I think we're currently in the era of the government-funded type of web projects that serve a great purpose for a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise be willing to pay for them. Right now the climate is such that developers with an idea can very inexpensively get that idea built and used, which can in turn, bolster their own resumes or possibly even result in an IPO exit or acquisition. Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.
dhotson 15y ago
I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around. I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me. I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again? Also, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on the topic of being a free user not that long ago: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ The TL;DR version was: Exploding growth + free service = losing lots of money. Ouch.
- davidw 15y ago
  (It's peace of mind. Piece of mind is something a brain surgeon finds stuck to his shirt when he goes home for the day)
  - BasDirks 15y ago
    There is also "to give a piece of mind".
    - liedra 15y ago
      I'll give you a piece of my mind if you keep going on about this! (not really, just giving an example :)
  - dhotson 15y ago
    Doh! Thanks. :-)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- didgeoridoo 15y ago
obtu 15y ago
That's nice, but what's the alternative? Putting the onus on contributors to back up what they publish would be a crap shot; even with backups there may not be a plan for recovery, and recovery may be impossible if the contributor is unable or unwilling to handle it themselves. Commenters and other participants have it even harder, due to the variety of sites and platforms they participate in (Lazarus can help saving one's own comments now that CoComment is shutting down, wget can be used to rescue content with advance warning). Maybe the best alternative would be a commitment from the platforms to keep a low-bandwidth, possibly throttled archive available; failing that, to outsource the work to an organisation like the internet archive. This would be a step up from the current standard, which is, at best, a period of warning (lets external participants make backups), or a commitment to data liberation, which unfortunately ends up with many contributors failing to republish their content.
- philwelch 15y ago
  It's probably well worth questioning the value of any of this crap above and beyond whatever immediate social value it gives. I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages? It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably not worthwhile to be a digital packrat.
  - smacktoward 15y ago
    > I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages? You might be surprised. Archaeologists are forced to derive much of what they know about vanished cultures from bits of ephemera from their daily lives -- things you'd find in a midden heap, like shards of discarded pottery, spat-out plant seeds and gnawed animal bones, and the like. Why? Because those are the things that survived. Would our understanding of those cultures be richer if we could hear their songs and read their poetry? Undoubtedly. But we can learn an awful lot about them from their ephemera, even without that.
    - 15y ago
shareme 15y ago
I think we have missed the un-mentioned point... What does this say about Twitter that they have to buy product staff? What does that say about the value of their IPO? The Thiel proposition would be, long-term, we should be betting against every one who IPO'd thus far.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  We saw a lot of this during Internet bubble v1.0 The issue is that a bunch of folks who will flip IPO shares need to quote a number-of-employees. The implication is that a high number of employees is an indicator of the viability of the company.
kylec 15y ago
Yeah, this has happened a number of times, enough that I'm wary of investing time and energy into using a service that appears to not have any means of making money. Last fall, I evaluated Posterous for my personal blog, but one of the reasons I ended up going with Squarespace instead is because it's a paid service: http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous-acquisition.html http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous...
- nikcub 15y ago
  I don't think being a paid service makes it more likely that it will be around forever, but it is a good input to use when weighing and comparing different services. I would probably place as much emphasis on data portability and content license terms. This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for-like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.
  - telent 15y ago
    Indeed. Google is a free service and Google Apps is a paid service, but I wouldn't expect significantly more longevity from the latter just because I'm paying them $x a year than I would from the loss-leader service.
    - robryan 15y ago
      I think it is a bad example because it is probably contributing less than 1% to Googles bottom line. Much easier to cut than if it were the primary revenue source for n individual company.
      - telent 15y ago
        For exactly that reason it's a really good example of the point I was making: what you really need to know is whether a given product is strategic to its supplier. "Am I paying for it?" is one indicator that it may be, but it's not conclusive
mark_l_watson 15y ago
I think that Reginald is talking about social media platforms' APIs and other infrastructure that 3rd parties can connect to for whatever business they are in. It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service. Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have. I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them. The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.
- mark_l_watson 15y ago
  From reading the other posts, I see that I misinterpreted the article. Saving blogging and other self promotion information is important. I hosted my own blogging solution in the past, but now I compromise: use Blogger, map it to a subdomain on my main web site, and make sure I back up Blogger's data so I could re-host it with some effort. So, I trade off some control for making life easier.
ryanoneill 15y ago
This happens repeatedly outside the startup world as well. The company I work for has relied on technology that Microsoft developed, supported, and subsequently walked away from. That is the nature of both business and technology.
aneth 15y ago
This is an interesting analogy, yet laughably impractical and wrong. Paid business models do not guarantee success. If they did, Posterous would have charged. It seems land is so cheap, landlords have concluded the best possible chance to find a business model is to be a free landlord. That is a great world for tenants since they don't have to pay rent, and it's a tough world for landlords since they have to maintain beautiful buildings with donation boxes and ad banners. Given the lack of tenant laws (imagine if there were tenant laws...) paying rent is no guarantee of anything. You can be evicted, abused, moved around, neglected, or anything else without warning or compensation. That's a good thing, which demonstrates how strained and poor this analogy is. Good luck finding quality, innovative, paid services to match Facebook, Twitter, and Posterous. Let us know how that goes. You'll have some luck, but I'm not sure your chances are much better. I call bullshit.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Everything Apple and most of Microsoft is paid.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Apple is an hardware company that writes software to go with it. It's apples and oranges, if you excuse the pun.
chrislomax 15y ago
This reminds me of the advert Google put out recently where it shows a father documenting his daughters life in YouTube, and sending her emails (from birth) with the videos on with a note of what it was all about in the email. She comes back to the email 20 years later and sees the document of her life with it all in. I just don't buy it, how do we know Google will be around in 20 years, never mind free solutions not supplemented with paid for services? Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is secure, nothing is forever. I wish I could say I could make a solution that would ease this problem but my solution might not stand the test of time. Shit happens! Saving it to your hard drive means you are only backing it up to something that could explode (dramatisation). Further backing up to the cloud is relying again on a solution that you are expecting to work and stick around, it may not! You need to go into any situation like this with some level of acknowledgement that it just might not work.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I'm not sure if it's the architects fault or the real estate investors. Land is so cheap, and investors seem to really like watching architects build stuff. For a long time, investors have believed if there are people in the building, the coffee bar or the valet parking will make them a lot of money. The problem is that it has also conditioned people to believe that all office space should be free. Those who build incredibly efficient office space are still going to have a hard time charging rent. These architect aquisitions are every bit as much about the investors as they are the architects. Until investors get selective and demand real value, I'm not sure it's going away. (Wow, I might need to go to prison for extended torture of an analogy.)
zeedog 15y ago
In my limited but growing experience dealing with free and paid users, I see it this way: when a customer pays for your product, it's like they're saying "I trust you." When you charge for something, you are asking for someone's trust because you believe in what you've created. You owe it to yourself to make people pay for what you build. Maybe Aladdin said it best...do you trust me? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ)
dredmorbius 15y ago
This used to be called "Who is not on LiveJournal[1]" http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html Notes: 1. An interesting story itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
- zalew 15y ago
  > When Bubble 2.0 is dead and gone, we'll still be here. of the alternatives he listed, 6 are dead. of the supposedly dead and gone bubble 2.0 products he listed, all are up and running.
davemel37 15y ago
I think it is an interesting point that people get more value out of your product when they are invested in it. When friends call me for marketing advice, I enjoy talking about it, and am always willing to share some insight for free, but this makes me wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Odds are, they just resent the advice, or even if they agree with it, how likely are they to use it if it's free. Seems like sharing ideas and free advice is a lose-lose. If you really want to help people, make them pay for it!
jacquesm 15y ago
The biggest loss is the backlinks to your carefully created content. For that reason alone I would never consider hosting something like a blog on real estate owned by another party. Another risk is that the domain sooner or later ends up in the hands of some scammer or pill pusher.
runako 15y ago
Spot-on. I looked at using Posterous, but decided against doing so because there was no way for anyone to pay them.
kappaknight 15y ago
Is it a little ironic that the blog is posted on Posterous? I only say that cause the complaint may disappear before its intended effect ring through the rest of the startup community.
- raganwald 15y ago
  That was one of the things that delighted me about writing it!
- benohear 15y ago
  That's precisely what makes the landlord metaphor so effective.
jwr 15y ago
This is well said and reflects my experience. These days I look for services that a) take money, b) probably won't get acquired soon. (a) is easier than (b), but if you look around you'll eventually find something. Good examples are: * Instapaper — Marco's one-man-shop, stable and profitable, * Smugmug — family owned, users pay them money, stable and profitable, * Dropbox — which I also pay for — but is still unlikely to find an acquirer. I recently decided not to sign on several new services because I couldn't see a business model. I'd like pg to address this in one of his essays, given that YC is all about building stuff people want without paying too much attention to the business side of things (e.g. actual cash flow), and with the explicit goal of reaching an exit for the founders.
- tptacek 15y ago
  YC seems (I obviously don't speak for them) to like companies like Smugmug and Instapaper --- see what Graham writes about Wufoo --- and over the long term, companies with established niches can obtain valuations that outstrip that niche. Black swans happen, and it's good to maximize your exposure to the good ones. But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often not worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies. The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies. So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.
  - revorad 15y ago
    Actually, YC's real returns will come from IPOs of big profitable companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, not exits any smaller than them. And I think there's room for more Dropboxes. What I find strange is that so few startups (YC-funded or not) even try the freemium model seriously. It took Dropbox a long time and a lot of experimentation to find a scalable business model, and they wouldn't have found it had they not been persistent. Building something great is harder than making money, but even YC's success depends on startups that can do both.
flavy 15y ago
Use a Key logger
nkurz 15y ago
But what's the alternative? Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move? The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid. Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary. For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.
- robryan 15y ago
  I think being paid there is more chance that they would be acquired for their product and not just the team. There is still no guarantee of course.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    Paid product companies don't get bought nearly as often, either. In a lot of ways it makes you an unattractive acquisition target.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
neosavvy 15y ago
In response to that all I can say is I have a landlord issue as well. http://bitchlandlady.tumblr.com/ http://bitchlandlady.tumblr.com/
charlieok 15y ago
For a second, he had me thinking that there were actually cool office buildings somewhere filled with interesting people providing free office space complete with coffee bars. That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.
justinkelly 15y ago
I've setup http://p.ostero.us http://p.ostero.us It's a paid Octpress based blogging service for the ex-posterous users - not more free rent - using an awesome blog platform - and a ongoing income generating service Hopefully this will help other posterous user wondering where to go * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092

Dear "Landlord"

325 points by vetler 15y ago

tgrass 15y ago

Is the De-Stijl Schroder house now an office?

raganwald 15y ago
No, it’s a museum. It just happens to be a favourite building of mine and an excellent example of making a complete break from convention, just like many start-ups :-)

markkanof 15y ago

So where in the world does this kind of thing happen? To me it sounds like a made up scenario and then an argument against the made up scenario. Could just be that it doesn't happen in the parts of the world that I have lived and worked though. UPDATE: Thanks for the clarification everyone. I guess I'm way too literal early in the morning.

pragmatic 15y ago
It's an analogy for "the super latest greatest startup web site" and how it's risky using it (aka moving in). You don't pay for it, so you don't have any claim as a tenant when they decide to cash out.
rkudeshi 15y ago
He's talking about startups getting acquired and then shutting down (see the last link of his post referencing Posterous).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ajuc 15y ago
It was analogy, not to be taken literaly. Ragenwald wanted to say that free services (webpages, applications, etc) provided by startups often ends up after a while, and people depending on them are left hanging.
ValG 15y ago
I could be wrong but I think this is a satire on what happened to Posterous, he's saying Posterous is the "landlord" and they built this "space" to work in for free; but they just did it with the intention of getting their name out there knowing that there would be an exit at some point. He feels betrayed b/c there was all of this trust built up and now they are closing down.
PedroCandeias 15y ago
Indeed. Maybe it's actually a metaphor for cool free apps and what happens when the startup behind them gets acquired?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

ValG 15y ago

An interesting satire on what's happening in the tech world, however, I'd be hesitant to be quite as critical. In the end, the service is free, it's not something that has to be provided. You should enjoy it while it's there and appreciate it, not feel entitled to it. Is it a little bit of a dick move? Yeah, but then again, what would you do if you were in their position?

telent 15y ago
I don't think the issue is so much "what should they do now", because what they should do now is constrained by what they can do. The issue is "what should they have done in 2008?" - should they for example have said "please note that our current business model is not sustainable, and while you are welcome to enjoy it while it's here you are cautioned not to behave as though it will be here for ever"? Providing a limited, ephemeral, or best-effort service is a perfectly OK thing to do provided your service users know that's what you're doing and can (as raganwald says he has) tailor their behavour accordingly
- ValG 15y ago
  Great point, but it's unbelievably difficult do carry something like that out practically. Who are the CEO's customers, the market the company is targeting, or the company's employees? I'd argue both, the CEO is the visionary and cheerleader for the staff, and also the public image for the customers. If you come out and say we are not sustainable, guess how many employees you'll have at the end of the week? Guess how many customers? After putting 100's or 1000's of hours into something, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to go that route
  - Drbble 15y ago
    This is where honesty has to be given its due. I expect A CEO to honestly state the max plausible downside and upside of their business, and to have a decent argument (which I take with a grain of salt) for why they expect the upside to happen. Then I make my own estimate, somewhere between the extremes, and act accordingly. The CEOs I respect (as employers, vendors, and investments) behave this way.

tptacek 15y ago

I think it's a little .----- and more than a little hyperbolic to suggest that Posterous wasn't a business, but rather just an exhibit for the team's portfolio. The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly. I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair. But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in? I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.

raganwald 15y ago
There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. I apologise if it comes across that way. I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site. FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood. The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan. So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.
- mbateman 15y ago
  > There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended by the post, and I apologise if it comes across that way. > I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site. That sounds like (and certainly comes across far more strongly in the blog post as) a criticism. It sounds fairer the way it was put here than how you said it there. Not having a monetization strategy that involves charging customers is not coextensive with being a mere portfolio exhibit.

JoelMcCracken 15y ago

Took me a minute or so to figure what he was talking about. I am not sure what the greater message is, here. Was Posterous "evil" for selling themselves to Twitter? Or, should users generally beware any company that does not have a revenue? At what level of revenue should users stop worrying? Not saying that it is likely, but should users of Dropbox worry that Apple will acquire them? Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.

raganwald 15y ago
I think it’s a question of lock-in. If someone wants to give a free service away and there’s very little lock-in, great! If a new restaurant opens in my neighbourhood, maybe the owner gives away free lunches to all the people working nearby. Great, go have lunch. But if there’s a big lock-in, as users you have to do your due diligence (we used to jokingly call it “doing the dew”). Say there’s a service for managing software projects. Well, if I’m going to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars plus my career and reputation on a service, I want to ask a lot of questions, that’s natural. I’m actually cool with Posterous, I hope the folks behind it do really well.
- JoelMcCracken 15y ago
  That makes sense. I realized just now that I sounded very critical of Posterous. I also hope they do very well. Posterous' "badness" is more of a matter of corporate moral personality. As a company develops, its leaders will have opportunities to make decisions which show their opinions on things. It doesn't surprise me when their future decisions also reflect those opinions. For a high-profile example: Remember when Google decided it was going to start censoring search results in China? At the time, it was huge, extremely surprising news. However, it also showed a change in corporate opinion. Given subsequent developments, you can "see" the change in corporate decisions.

brudgers 15y ago

Interesting metaphor. The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks. Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way: It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on Pocahontas was significantly better.

Drbble 15y ago
Celebration is also ongoing PR for the Disney mystique, like Google's autonomous car project.

edw519 15y ago

I use Posterous, Weebly, Hacker News, and twitter, and love them all. I don't pay a nickel to any of them and never will. I hope very much that they all last forever. But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds. <HN201203141055.txt> [UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]

revorad 15y ago
Wow, do you always copy+paste or download everything you write on the internets?
- wladimir 15y ago
  There's the "It's all text" Firefox extension which might help here. It can open your favorite text editor for text areas. This makes it easier to save a backup copy (I guess you could change it to do this automatically), no copy/paste needed.
  - slug 15y ago
    That's a pretty neat extension, thanks! To make it work on my machine I had to follow this though: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/reviews/337255/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/...
- edw519 15y ago
  Yes. I write everything in TextPad first, saving as I go with Control-S to the appropriate directory using the date & time in the file name. I like to work full screen in large letters and I love lime green on black. I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons). Seems like I'm the only one who has a record of anything because of my practice. I operate under the assumption that anything free will go away at some point. I plan on moving somewhere else with my data. Also, it's really easy to find anything on my hard disk. A little background: Years ago, I found my best friend from college and we started to exchange emails. I emailed him a trivia quiz with 20 questions. He later told me that he was laughing like crazy while he answered them for the next hour. His wife called him when he was on Question #19. By the time he returned, his computer had crashed and he lost everything. (This was obviously pre-Gmail.) Now we'll never know what he answered. I don't know what will be important later, so I'll never let anything like that ever happen to me.

dkrich 15y ago

I think we're currently in the era of the government-funded type of web projects that serve a great purpose for a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise be willing to pay for them. Right now the climate is such that developers with an idea can very inexpensively get that idea built and used, which can in turn, bolster their own resumes or possibly even result in an IPO exit or acquisition. Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.

dhotson 15y ago

I really wish I could pay for free services just for the peace of mind that they'll stick around. I've got my website on Tumblr and by using their service I feel like I'm making a pretty big commitment to them, but since it's free it doesn't feel like they have the same level of commitment to me. I freaking love Tumblr and would be happy to pay. But right now it's not clear to me if they're making any money at all and that's a big concern as a user. Just remind me, how do those guys make money again? Also, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on the topic of being a free user not that long ago: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ The TL;DR version was: Exploding growth + free service = losing lots of money. Ouch.

davidw 15y ago
(It's peace of mind. Piece of mind is something a brain surgeon finds stuck to his shirt when he goes home for the day)
- BasDirks 15y ago
  There is also "to give a piece of mind".
  - liedra 15y ago
    I'll give you a piece of my mind if you keep going on about this! (not really, just giving an example :)
- dhotson 15y ago
  Doh! Thanks. :-)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
didgeoridoo 15y ago

obtu 15y ago

That's nice, but what's the alternative? Putting the onus on contributors to back up what they publish would be a crap shot; even with backups there may not be a plan for recovery, and recovery may be impossible if the contributor is unable or unwilling to handle it themselves. Commenters and other participants have it even harder, due to the variety of sites and platforms they participate in (Lazarus can help saving one's own comments now that CoComment is shutting down, wget can be used to rescue content with advance warning). Maybe the best alternative would be a commitment from the platforms to keep a low-bandwidth, possibly throttled archive available; failing that, to outsource the work to an organisation like the internet archive. This would be a step up from the current standard, which is, at best, a period of warning (lets external participants make backups), or a commitment to data liberation, which unfortunately ends up with many contributors failing to republish their content.

philwelch 15y ago
It's probably well worth questioning the value of any of this crap above and beyond whatever immediate social value it gives. I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages? It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably not worthwhile to be a digital packrat.
- smacktoward 15y ago
  > I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages? You might be surprised. Archaeologists are forced to derive much of what they know about vanished cultures from bits of ephemera from their daily lives -- things you'd find in a midden heap, like shards of discarded pottery, spat-out plant seeds and gnawed animal bones, and the like. Why? Because those are the things that survived. Would our understanding of those cultures be richer if we could hear their songs and read their poetry? Undoubtedly. But we can learn an awful lot about them from their ephemera, even without that.
  - 15y ago

shareme 15y ago

I think we have missed the un-mentioned point... What does this say about Twitter that they have to buy product staff? What does that say about the value of their IPO? The Thiel proposition would be, long-term, we should be betting against every one who IPO'd thus far.

jpdoctor 15y ago
We saw a lot of this during Internet bubble v1.0 The issue is that a bunch of folks who will flip IPO shares need to quote a number-of-employees. The implication is that a high number of employees is an indicator of the viability of the company.

kylec 15y ago

Yeah, this has happened a number of times, enough that I'm wary of investing time and energy into using a service that appears to not have any means of making money. Last fall, I evaluated Posterous for my personal blog, but one of the reasons I ended up going with Squarespace instead is because it's a paid service: http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous-acquisition.html http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/3/13/my-thoughts-on-posterous...

nikcub 15y ago
I don't think being a paid service makes it more likely that it will be around forever, but it is a good input to use when weighing and comparing different services. I would probably place as much emphasis on data portability and content license terms. This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for-like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.
- telent 15y ago
  Indeed. Google is a free service and Google Apps is a paid service, but I wouldn't expect significantly more longevity from the latter just because I'm paying them $x a year than I would from the loss-leader service.
  - robryan 15y ago
    I think it is a bad example because it is probably contributing less than 1% to Googles bottom line. Much easier to cut than if it were the primary revenue source for n individual company.
    - telent 15y ago
      For exactly that reason it's a really good example of the point I was making: what you really need to know is whether a given product is strategic to its supplier. "Am I paying for it?" is one indicator that it may be, but it's not conclusive

mark_l_watson 15y ago

I think that Reginald is talking about social media platforms' APIs and other infrastructure that 3rd parties can connect to for whatever business they are in. It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service. Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have. I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them. The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.

mark_l_watson 15y ago
From reading the other posts, I see that I misinterpreted the article. Saving blogging and other self promotion information is important. I hosted my own blogging solution in the past, but now I compromise: use Blogger, map it to a subdomain on my main web site, and make sure I back up Blogger's data so I could re-host it with some effort. So, I trade off some control for making life easier.

ryanoneill 15y ago

This happens repeatedly outside the startup world as well. The company I work for has relied on technology that Microsoft developed, supported, and subsequently walked away from. That is the nature of both business and technology.

aneth 15y ago

This is an interesting analogy, yet laughably impractical and wrong. Paid business models do not guarantee success. If they did, Posterous would have charged. It seems land is so cheap, landlords have concluded the best possible chance to find a business model is to be a free landlord. That is a great world for tenants since they don't have to pay rent, and it's a tough world for landlords since they have to maintain beautiful buildings with donation boxes and ad banners. Given the lack of tenant laws (imagine if there were tenant laws...) paying rent is no guarantee of anything. You can be evicted, abused, moved around, neglected, or anything else without warning or compensation. That's a good thing, which demonstrates how strained and poor this analogy is. Good luck finding quality, innovative, paid services to match Facebook, Twitter, and Posterous. Let us know how that goes. You'll have some luck, but I'm not sure your chances are much better. I call bullshit.

Drbble 15y ago
Everything Apple and most of Microsoft is paid.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Apple is an hardware company that writes software to go with it. It's apples and oranges, if you excuse the pun.

chrislomax 15y ago

This reminds me of the advert Google put out recently where it shows a father documenting his daughters life in YouTube, and sending her emails (from birth) with the videos on with a note of what it was all about in the email. She comes back to the email 20 years later and sees the document of her life with it all in. I just don't buy it, how do we know Google will be around in 20 years, never mind free solutions not supplemented with paid for services? Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is secure, nothing is forever. I wish I could say I could make a solution that would ease this problem but my solution might not stand the test of time. Shit happens! Saving it to your hard drive means you are only backing it up to something that could explode (dramatisation). Further backing up to the cloud is relying again on a solution that you are expecting to work and stick around, it may not! You need to go into any situation like this with some level of acknowledgement that it just might not work.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

I'm not sure if it's the architects fault or the real estate investors. Land is so cheap, and investors seem to really like watching architects build stuff. For a long time, investors have believed if there are people in the building, the coffee bar or the valet parking will make them a lot of money. The problem is that it has also conditioned people to believe that all office space should be free. Those who build incredibly efficient office space are still going to have a hard time charging rent. These architect aquisitions are every bit as much about the investors as they are the architects. Until investors get selective and demand real value, I'm not sure it's going away. (Wow, I might need to go to prison for extended torture of an analogy.)

zeedog 15y ago

In my limited but growing experience dealing with free and paid users, I see it this way: when a customer pays for your product, it's like they're saying "I trust you." When you charge for something, you are asking for someone's trust because you believe in what you've created. You owe it to yourself to make people pay for what you build. Maybe Aladdin said it best...do you trust me? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ)

dredmorbius 15y ago

This used to be called "Who is not on LiveJournal[1]" http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html Notes: 1. An interesting story itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal

zalew 15y ago
> When Bubble 2.0 is dead and gone, we'll still be here. of the alternatives he listed, 6 are dead. of the supposedly dead and gone bubble 2.0 products he listed, all are up and running.

davemel37 15y ago

I think it is an interesting point that people get more value out of your product when they are invested in it. When friends call me for marketing advice, I enjoy talking about it, and am always willing to share some insight for free, but this makes me wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Odds are, they just resent the advice, or even if they agree with it, how likely are they to use it if it's free. Seems like sharing ideas and free advice is a lose-lose. If you really want to help people, make them pay for it!

jacquesm 15y ago

The biggest loss is the backlinks to your carefully created content. For that reason alone I would never consider hosting something like a blog on real estate owned by another party. Another risk is that the domain sooner or later ends up in the hands of some scammer or pill pusher.

runako 15y ago

Spot-on. I looked at using Posterous, but decided against doing so because there was no way for anyone to pay them.

kappaknight 15y ago

Is it a little ironic that the blog is posted on Posterous? I only say that cause the complaint may disappear before its intended effect ring through the rest of the startup community.

raganwald 15y ago
That was one of the things that delighted me about writing it!
benohear 15y ago
That's precisely what makes the landlord metaphor so effective.

jwr 15y ago

This is well said and reflects my experience. These days I look for services that a) take money, b) probably won't get acquired soon. (a) is easier than (b), but if you look around you'll eventually find something. Good examples are: * Instapaper — Marco's one-man-shop, stable and profitable, * Smugmug — family owned, users pay them money, stable and profitable, * Dropbox — which I also pay for — but is still unlikely to find an acquirer. I recently decided not to sign on several new services because I couldn't see a business model. I'd like pg to address this in one of his essays, given that YC is all about building stuff people want without paying too much attention to the business side of things (e.g. actual cash flow), and with the explicit goal of reaching an exit for the founders.

tptacek 15y ago
YC seems (I obviously don't speak for them) to like companies like Smugmug and Instapaper --- see what Graham writes about Wufoo --- and over the long term, companies with established niches can obtain valuations that outstrip that niche. Black swans happen, and it's good to maximize your exposure to the good ones. But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often not worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies. The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies. So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.
- revorad 15y ago
  Actually, YC's real returns will come from IPOs of big profitable companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, not exits any smaller than them. And I think there's room for more Dropboxes. What I find strange is that so few startups (YC-funded or not) even try the freemium model seriously. It took Dropbox a long time and a lot of experimentation to find a scalable business model, and they wouldn't have found it had they not been persistent. Building something great is harder than making money, but even YC's success depends on startups that can do both.

flavy 15y ago

Use a Key logger

nkurz 15y ago

But what's the alternative? Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move? The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid. Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary. For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.

robryan 15y ago
I think being paid there is more chance that they would be acquired for their product and not just the team. There is still no guarantee of course.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  Paid product companies don't get bought nearly as often, either. In a lot of ways it makes you an unattractive acquisition target.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

neosavvy 15y ago

In response to that all I can say is I have a landlord issue as well. http://bitchlandlady.tumblr.com/ http://bitchlandlady.tumblr.com/

charlieok 15y ago

For a second, he had me thinking that there were actually cool office buildings somewhere filled with interesting people providing free office space complete with coffee bars. That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.

justinkelly 15y ago

I've setup http://p.ostero.us http://p.ostero.us It's a paid Octpress based blogging service for the ex-posterous users - not more free rent - using an awesome blog platform - and a ongoing income generating service Hopefully this will help other posterous user wondering where to go * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092