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Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build

Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.

theamk 3y ago
I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time. (2) Generate lots of press visibility. (3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.
- mvkel 3y ago
  What makes automattic gullible?
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper It certainly sounds like… Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and early investor CEO of Automattic saved their failing personal investment by bailing them out and letting automattic foot the bill. Nice having a friend CEO, huh? I mean, you’ve got to hope/believe the other folk at automattic did their due diligence, but it does look like automattic is paying the bills for their CEO to bail out their friends. That would make them gullible and seems pretty shady unless they really do have some astonishing reason to expect this to pay off… or they got it dirt cheap, in my opinion.
    - afavour 3y ago
      > Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage I don't think that's true at all. I'd never heard of Beeper before their integration with iMessage and the fact that it was disabled by Apple was seen as a negative on Apple, not Beeper. They raised their profile, now they're cashing out.
    - mvkel 3y ago
      This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this would need board approval, and a good board needs ... rigorous dd.
      - housebear 3y ago
        This is the same board that approved the Tumblr acquisition, presumably. So...a good board...?
        mvkel 3y ago
        For pennies on the dollar, and for a very specific strategy, which Mullenweg outlined pretty thoroughly. Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000
        markx2 3y ago
        They approved the tumblr deal. Matt promised targets. Every target was missed and financially the deal was a failure. The board then stopped any further acquisitions. I would guess that texts / beeper were cheap and that Matt is looking at a very very long time to profit. He was once a fan of the 'pizza/team' ratio that Bezos/Amazon pushed, so maybe that's where he is looking.
      - ksherlock 3y ago
        counterpoint: Tesla/Musk/Solar City
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        From 2005 to the end Yahoo’s role in the SV ecosystem seemed to be the people who would buy any company if the founder had the right connections, for instance the son of a private equity lord who licensed a worthless patent from Stanford that Yahoo paid $100+ for. It is a magical way to turn “anybody” into a successful founder or VC if they’ve got the right connections and in fact you can create both ex-nihilo in one transaction. If you read the newspapers you’d never find out that 70% of acquisitions achieve their goals. A lot of that is you hear more about the ones that fail and not the ones that succeed. The ones that fail give many people the impression that there is nothing rational at all about how acquisitions happen in corporate America.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nikanj 3y ago
  My theory is Beeper being a sacrificial lamb so Google/Samsung can cry to EU about iMessage. ”See they’re restricting this poor little startup from competing! Pay no attention to the funding coming from Samsung, this is definitely a poor underdog of a company!”
- Grustaf 3y ago
  It wasn't, they genuinely believe in Beeper, and the long term plan was rather to become the leading chat app in their own right, with users communicating over the Beeper protocol.
  - LorenDB 3y ago
    A bit of pedanticism here - it's not the Beeper protocol, it's the Matrix protocol. Beeper is built on top of Matrix (using bridges that you could host on your own server if you wanted).
    - xinayder 3y ago
      Except there are a lot of Beeper-only Matrix spec implementations that aren't available for everyone else. In other words, no other Matrix homeserver or client can benefit from the features Beeper has.
    - Grustaf 3y ago
      What i meant was that the idea was that people would eventually stop using e.g. whatsapp on Beeper and just use Beeper, since eventually all their friends would also have the beeper app installed. Might sound a bit optimistic but there it is.
ClaraForm 3y ago
I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?
- eugenekolo 3y ago
  That's a bit of my point. At any time your business model can get interrupted when you're doing things "that the big company isn't, but holds the gate to". Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost useless. It's a business model that works to get to some point, and then exit as soon as possible, IMO.
  - ClaraForm 3y ago
    I guess I didn’t think about it like that. If everyone opens up, Beeper’s competition is suddenly WhatsApp, instead of being one of their assets.
- basisword 3y ago
  If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability. The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won. Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
yoavm 3y ago
With all the new regulations coming out of the EU, I think that if Beeper stays around long enough they might actually live to see the day where these networks have official APIs.
- drkleiner 3y ago
  Then Beeper would just be replaced by bigger fish (or open source fish)
  - yoavm 3y ago
    All the bridges used by Beeper are already open source, and Beeper itself uses Matrix which is open source too.
riedel 3y ago
They are running Matrix bridges in the cloud for people that do not want to self host. Don't think the iMessage stunt was really planned. It was an opportunity to get visibility. Should rather thank them: they put regulatory pressure on apple.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
guluarte 3y ago
I agree it must be a engineering nightmare, a whatsapp/imessage update and your app is gone.

theamk 3y ago

I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time. (2) Generate lots of press visibility. (3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.

mvkel 3y ago
What makes automattic gullible?
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper It certainly sounds like… Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and early investor CEO of Automattic saved their failing personal investment by bailing them out and letting automattic foot the bill. Nice having a friend CEO, huh? I mean, you’ve got to hope/believe the other folk at automattic did their due diligence, but it does look like automattic is paying the bills for their CEO to bail out their friends. That would make them gullible and seems pretty shady unless they really do have some astonishing reason to expect this to pay off… or they got it dirt cheap, in my opinion.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage I don't think that's true at all. I'd never heard of Beeper before their integration with iMessage and the fact that it was disabled by Apple was seen as a negative on Apple, not Beeper. They raised their profile, now they're cashing out.
  - mvkel 3y ago
    This isn't how business works. A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face. Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on. How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m. Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this would need board approval, and a good board needs ... rigorous dd.
    - housebear 3y ago
      This is the same board that approved the Tumblr acquisition, presumably. So...a good board...?
      - mvkel 3y ago
        For pennies on the dollar, and for a very specific strategy, which Mullenweg outlined pretty thoroughly. Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000
      - markx2 3y ago
        They approved the tumblr deal. Matt promised targets. Every target was missed and financially the deal was a failure. The board then stopped any further acquisitions. I would guess that texts / beeper were cheap and that Matt is looking at a very very long time to profit. He was once a fan of the 'pizza/team' ratio that Bezos/Amazon pushed, so maybe that's where he is looking.
    - ksherlock 3y ago
      counterpoint: Tesla/Musk/Solar City
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      From 2005 to the end Yahoo’s role in the SV ecosystem seemed to be the people who would buy any company if the founder had the right connections, for instance the son of a private equity lord who licensed a worthless patent from Stanford that Yahoo paid $100+ for. It is a magical way to turn “anybody” into a successful founder or VC if they’ve got the right connections and in fact you can create both ex-nihilo in one transaction. If you read the newspapers you’d never find out that 70% of acquisitions achieve their goals. A lot of that is you hear more about the ones that fail and not the ones that succeed. The ones that fail give many people the impression that there is nothing rational at all about how acquisitions happen in corporate America.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nikanj 3y ago
My theory is Beeper being a sacrificial lamb so Google/Samsung can cry to EU about iMessage. ”See they’re restricting this poor little startup from competing! Pay no attention to the funding coming from Samsung, this is definitely a poor underdog of a company!”
Grustaf 3y ago
It wasn't, they genuinely believe in Beeper, and the long term plan was rather to become the leading chat app in their own right, with users communicating over the Beeper protocol.
- LorenDB 3y ago
  A bit of pedanticism here - it's not the Beeper protocol, it's the Matrix protocol. Beeper is built on top of Matrix (using bridges that you could host on your own server if you wanted).
  - xinayder 3y ago
    Except there are a lot of Beeper-only Matrix spec implementations that aren't available for everyone else. In other words, no other Matrix homeserver or client can benefit from the features Beeper has.
  - Grustaf 3y ago
    What i meant was that the idea was that people would eventually stop using e.g. whatsapp on Beeper and just use Beeper, since eventually all their friends would also have the beeper app installed. Might sound a bit optimistic but there it is.

ClaraForm 3y ago

I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?

eugenekolo 3y ago
That's a bit of my point. At any time your business model can get interrupted when you're doing things "that the big company isn't, but holds the gate to". Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost useless. It's a business model that works to get to some point, and then exit as soon as possible, IMO.
- ClaraForm 3y ago
  I guess I didn’t think about it like that. If everyone opens up, Beeper’s competition is suddenly WhatsApp, instead of being one of their assets.
basisword 3y ago
If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.
- lxgr 3y ago
  To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability. The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won. Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

yoavm 3y ago

With all the new regulations coming out of the EU, I think that if Beeper stays around long enough they might actually live to see the day where these networks have official APIs.

drkleiner 3y ago
Then Beeper would just be replaced by bigger fish (or open source fish)
- yoavm 3y ago
  All the bridges used by Beeper are already open source, and Beeper itself uses Matrix which is open source too.

riedel 3y ago

They are running Matrix bridges in the cloud for people that do not want to self host. Don't think the iMessage stunt was really planned. It was an opportunity to get visibility. Should rather thank them: they put regulatory pressure on apple.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

guluarte 3y ago

I agree it must be a engineering nightmare, a whatsapp/imessage update and your app is gone.