11 ms·

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

422 points by conesus 14y ago

zheng 14y ago
It must have been an intense mix of fear and excitement trying to fix anything and everything that broke, but NewsBlur deserves it IMO. It is a great product, and I think this post makes it clear that he cares about his users' experience.
recuter 14y ago
I'd just like to point out that '$24/yr * high four-figures of paying costumers' with only one employee ensures NewsBlur will be around for a long time. :) This is the kind of single founder "life style" startup that VC's would paw-paw that is Doing It Right that many of us aspire to. The other ones I can think of are Pinboard and Instapaper. I'd rather go this route, personally, here's to more like these. Cheers.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down. Pinboard and now Newsblur.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Quick, someone make a search engine!
    - vineet 14y ago
      See https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ :-)
  - misiti3780 14y ago
    but delicious is still around, it was never shutdown, and from what i can tell, is better (from a functionality perspective) and has a bigger community than pinboard. the site design of pinboard alone turns me off to it
  - boyter 14y ago
    Thats actually a really good idea. I wonder what would be next? Most of Yahoo's properties seem be be neglected at the moment, but what about Google? Google News perhaps?
    - bobdvb 14y ago
      flikr -> openphoto
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      Probably Google Alerts. It's rather niche but people who use it absolutely rely on it. But the VC-funded Mention seems poised to take that one.
      - frankdenbow 14y ago
        I have been using warble.co recently, which does alerts for twitter
      - MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
        Google Alerts is a good candidate. Pardon anecdotal evidence, but the people in my circles who rely on it are executives who watch for their own names, or brand managers who watch for coverage of their company. This information is very valuable and I'm sure a good service could charge a nice premium.
        darkspaten 14y ago
        I've received some deliverables from a marketing team which uses the following service for just such a purpose (at a nice premium) @ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-media-monitoring/ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-med...
- amix 14y ago
  With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.
  - klox 14y ago
    3400 is only the number of new paying users in the last 24 hours. The amount of annual income from this product will now end with "million".
    - meh02 14y ago
      LOL, no. After the Reader-is-dead news cycle ends, the money will stop flowing, and the real work (supporting paying users) begins.
    - DuskStar 14y ago
      Oh, wow. I had not realized that number was the DAILY signups...
    - wilfra 14y ago
      revenue, not income - he's going to have high server costs now and if he wants to keep this scaling up, i suspect he'll need to bring on another person soon. at the very least, a customer service rep. still should easily net him a nice recurring six figure salary.
      - klox 14y ago
        Currently adding over 4k paid users per day. He reaches $1 million at just over 40k paid users. Factor in the userbase he's already been building for 4 years, the hundreds of thousands of Google Readers currently leaving, the millions that will need to find a replacement before July, and the last-minute movers on July 1st. I don't think server costs and a couple of employees will put him below a 7 figure income.
  - recuter 14y ago
    > "Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally)". That's at least $200,000/yr with high margins.
- overshard 14y ago
  I agree, this is a great model. To shameless plug myself I plan on doing the same with Pinry: http://getpinry.com/ http://getpinry.com/
- mikeash 14y ago
  It does make the truck number rather low. This is still probably less of a risk than trusting Google to keep a marginal product around (as recent events demonstrate), but there are different risks for small organizations that big ones don't share.
carterschonwald 14y ago
Props on having an exciting validating road over the next few months! Likewise, what are some of the engineering things you'd really like some of the more dev heavy users to maybe help via pull requests with? :) (I see that the github issues list is relatively short)
electic 14y ago
I tried out NewsBlur and sadly, Feedly seems leagues better.
- Roritharr 14y ago
  Could you atleast describe what is better about Feedly, so not only the creator of NewsBlur, but also anyone looking to spend money on an RSS Solution gets your informed input?
  - lazugod 14y ago
    I briefly tried both. * Feedly has a simple interface which is much more like Google Reader. But it depends on a plugin (or an app) rather than being an allwhere accessible website. Their Kindle Fire app seemed to load content extremely slowly, and its interface wasn't a simple list. And it's free, so I can't be a customer and I don't know how they earn money. * NewsBlur is complicated and unresponsive. There are a lot of inscrutable unlabeled icons, and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse. It's a paid service - I can be a customer - but I don't know how sustainable NewsBlur will be with its current issues and with subscription as its only source of funding. If NewsBlur seems solid by May, I'll gladly pay them. If Feedly seems less like a faceless data-miner by May, I'll use them.
    - korg250 14y ago
      "and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse." Really? It is a feature for better reading, so you can can easily see which line you are.
      - bsg75 14y ago
        Make sense now that someone points it out! For those who mouse click to mark reading point.
        glenra 14y ago
        Aha. It somehow hadn't occurred to me to click on that triangle. I'm still not sure it's a useful-to-me feature, but it at least makes a little more sense now. It's less annoying once locked down, anyway. Maybe it should default to being locked down somewhere and only unlock the first time you click on it, rather than default to floating around freely.
Maven911 14y ago
Hi, So i have noticed that you are very forthcoming with data, such as providing the number of premium users on your webpage, and I hope you continue this - I really hope you become more succesful with this Google Reader debacle going on. 1) Why are you open about the number of users ? (personally I think its great) 2) How do the real-time stats work, I notice that the amount of regular users was over 20k a few days ago, and now its 8k. Are these the users who have used the client/service in the past 24 hours ? (and not the actual total amount of users)
- DuskStar 14y ago
  From another comment, those numbers appear to be the new signups in the last 24 hours - and as the free option became much harder to find recently, I would expect the number of free signups to decrease dramatically.
  - Semaphor 14y ago
    > and as the free option became much harder to find recently That's only temporary though.
conesus 14y ago
And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow? ... <snip: barriers to entry> ... That's the barrier to entry. Not how hard it is to switch in: it's how hard it might be to switch out. And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently. Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology. If you know that in the absolute worst case that you can still use the product even if it's shut down, then by golly, you have even less of a reason to not switch to it.
- mynegation 14y ago
  I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed. Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given that you indicated that low barriers to entry are important to you. I am not a web developer so that can partially explain my struggle with fabric, Django and multitude of webdev and devops modules that you use. I wish you good luck and I hope that you take this wonderful product even further.
  - conesus 14y ago
mynegation 14y ago
I wonder what Samuel's attitude towards taking external financing is. Because NewsBlur is having a hell of a momentum on Google Reader news (pun not intended).
- conesus 14y ago
  I was in YC's Summer 2012 batch, so you be the judge. :-)
- Maxious 14y ago
  NewsBlur was funded as part of YCombinator Summer '12 http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-reading-back-to-th http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-readi... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurblogs-roy-and-y-combinator http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl...
- recuter 14y ago
  Well now that he has a graph pointing up and to the right he can certainly raise money and collect developers as if they were Pokemon and play games with the valuation in the hopes that somebody Acquihires Newsblur or buys them for some opaque strategic reasons. Maybe Google will buy them! :) Edit: I kid, but that's actually a possibility in my mind and would be an ironic outcome. Maybe Facebook or Yahoo or somesuch will see the value of having the New Reader. Selfishly, I am hoping for something else.
  - rdl 14y ago
    IMO the best acquirer would be someone who wanted credibility among high-end technical users or journalists, not someone who wanted to turn it into a mass-market thing. If I were Palantir, I'd probably drop $250k/yr to run the World's Best RSS Reader for the kind of research analysts who become Palantir customers, and the kind of geeks who make awesome Palantir employees. There are maybe a hundred companies you could substitute for Palantir here. Seriously ironic that both of the likely Reader successors are YC funded (Feedly and Newsblur)
  - thefuturewasnow 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
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niggler 14y ago
Congratulations on being well-positioned and ready to handle the onslaught when Google announced that they were axing Reader. You clearly were "where the puck will be" :)
btbuildem 14y ago
Congrats! Enjoy the ride..
jpwagner 14y ago
So far I am not a user of ANY reader. Between googlenews, twitter, and HN I get my daily digest. I would like to try Newsblur but it seems that to get immediate value I have to have been some reader user: I can migrate my googlereader account or upload an OPML file. What I would like to see are different versions of OOTB "skins". I can sign up as an "HN-lover" and it seeds my account with 50 blogs I should follow. Then I can actually evaluate the product. Also note that free accounts are not actually disabled. If you leave the session when you hit the paywall and login from the homepage, you now have a free account.
- conesus 14y ago
  As I mentioned on Twitter, if you want a free account but can't get around the paywall, just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise...
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise... This is my new favorite typo.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      I don't think that's a typo.
- jpwagner 14y ago
  In other words: does anyone with a reader setup they love want to share their OPML file so I can try out Newsblur? Thanks!
  - thefuturewasnow 14y ago
    here is a link to mine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/afksdrwxc1f0thq/subscriptions.xml https://www.dropbox.com/s/afksdrwxc1f0thq/subscriptions.xml
- 18pfsmt 14y ago
klox 14y ago
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" Congratulations. This is why I love SaaS. 6 figures revenue in a couple of days, and I can only imagine how much more will be made in the next 3 months... and beyond. But it's not a once-off payday. This is recurring. 7 figure annual income is yours, Sam. People slave away for decades trying to reach a tiny fraction of this amount. Put it to good use, brother.
- LargeWu 14y ago
  "6 figures revenue in a couple of days" Those couple of days took 4 years of preparation.
  - klox 14y ago
    Yes. Which is why the first line of my comment literally reads "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity".
rdl 14y ago
I'm interested in your decision process in picking Reliable and then Digital Ocean.
- conesus 14y ago
  Originally price, now price + API for deploying new instances. If you check out my fabfile.py script you'll see that I have EC2 setup and ready but I don't use it because it costs more, runs slower, and is a pain in the butt to maintain.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Oh, I meant vs. spending $20k on hardware, or partnering with someone like Softlayer/Rackspace as a promotional thing (I suspect either would be willing to give you a great deal to use as a marketing case)
    - jcampbell1 14y ago
      My guess... DO offers hardware in 60 seconds. Also cheaper/faster than EC2.
  - your_perception 14y ago
    I am guessing you're using DO VPS for very specific purposes. I have a VPS on it myself, but they do not provide any way for VPSes to network with each other, which is annoying for multi-host setups. If you have them communicating with each other, I'd appreciate it if you shared your approach. And congrats on your increased traffic.
    - conesus 14y ago
      It's the one manual step I have to do. After I provision a server, I copy the IP and stick it in a few places (my fabfile, my hosts file that I then re-copy to every other machine, and my HAProxy config). While I do provision new servers regularly, I don't auto-scale, so I don't have a need for pure automation. It would be nice, but that's something I look into when I learn about new deployment procedures.
momonga 14y ago
Thanks for providing this service and having such great communication with users!
mamcx 14y ago
Do you have a API? I was building a news reader for iOS when !kaput! Google reader (I was in the middle of integrate it). Now I wonder what to do next. I love to support another "small" players like yours...
- conesus 14y ago
  You bet I do: http://www.newsblur.com/api http://www.newsblur.com/api. I would love to hear about your ideas. I feature a number of third-party extensions and apps written against NewsBlur's API on the Goodies page.
steve19 14y ago
Will you be adding a Google Reader compatible API? (So existing Google Reader apps can quickly switch to NewsBlur)
- nicw 14y ago
  You can do this currently. My feeds were quickly ingested and everything worked great.
  - Semaphor 14y ago
    In case you wonder why you are getting downvoted: He is asking about a compatible API for 3rd party apps (Reeder, gReader and so on) to be able to connect to newsblur just by changing the API URL.
    - nicw 14y ago
      Ah ha, thanks :) Woke up this morning and was wondering why. Was a late night post.
sdfjkl 14y ago
That was surprisingly clueful of PayPal. Usually that part of the story is way more dramatic and ends up with alternate payment options.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  Only in the stories. The majority of situations where PayPal calls probably end just like this. I've taken that call myself and didn't have a problem. The stories we read are almost all about people doing things they shouldn't with any payment processor; that's why it only gets worse when the processor learns the details.
  - lucaspiller 14y ago
    Agreed, when the company I work for was just one guy, he had the same thing. They put a hold on funds (he had a lot of declined payments, nothing dodgy, just users not knowing how to use company credit cards), but as soon they'd checked all the paperwork they released it after a few weeks.
qoo 14y ago
"I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur." And then the black swan event comes. And then fire everywhere.
- jbackus 14y ago
  Same paragraph: > I did not expect it to come this soon.
- misiti3780 14y ago
  ironically, black swans, by their very nature, are in fact unpredictable (at least according to Nassim Tabeb) :)
randall 14y ago
I want to buy! Take my money! But your site errors out after CC deets. :(
habosa 14y ago
Can I possibly buy a month or two at a time? I want to try it out without buying a whole year. I know that's cheap of me, but I'll probably be trying a few RSS readers in the near future.
rodgerd 14y ago
<blockquote>The inevitable file descriptor limits on Linux means that for every database connection you make, you use up one of the 1,024 file descriptors that are allocated to your process by default. Changing these limits is not only non-trivial, but they don’t tend to stick.</blockquote> You're clearly a talented programmer, but perhaps employee #2 should be a sysadmin.
deleted 14y ago
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Maven911 14y ago
If i understood the numbers correctly, newsblur has went from 1500 paying/50000 free users to 6500 paying/110000 free users?
tempestn 14y ago
A tad off topic, but I'm hoping the fastest way to get an answer: How does one move or delete multiple feeds at once in newsblur? There must be a way to do this, right? Say I import 100 feeds from an OPML file, then realize I actually want them all in a folder. At the moment the only way I can figure out how to do that is to click on each feed, click move to folder, click the folder dropdown box, click the folder I want, click save. Times 100. Or I can save one click each by deleting them all then re-importing. But there must be a faster way. (In Google Reader settings, one could filter all folders with a keyword pattern, and bulk move.)
- Semaphor 14y ago
  Heh, wondered that myself yesterday after I realized my OPML contained old feeds for some reason. Reimporting feeds will delete your current feeds :)
  - tempestn 14y ago
    Hmm.. that would be helpful. Unfortunately it looks like there are some bugs to iron out. Twice in a row now, I've created a folder, then in the folder menu got to add feeds to that folder, imported an opml file, and... the folder disappears and the feeds go into the root.
- VLM 14y ago
  I had a nearly identical experience. I took it as a spring cleaning moment and deleted about 10 basically dead or no longer interesting feeds. So it took about 2 hours, but most of it was mental processing, reviewing recent posts (if any) and thinking about each feed for about a minute. UI improvements would be cool, but spring cleaning still would have burned about 2 hours anyway.
TheTaytay 14y ago
Sam, congrats! For a task a parallelizable as fetching feeds, I can't recommend Picloud.com enough. You can ssh into a box, provision it however you want, save that image off, and then run arbitrary commands/scripts on instances of that image, on the CPU type you want, and pay only for the seconds of usage you have. (Their "s1" core type is $0.04/hour: http://www.picloud.com/pricing/ http://www.picloud.com/pricing/ ) They also have a system that lets you mount the same shared "drive" from multiple instances at the same time, so if you're doing file-based stuff, it's easy. The thing I like about it is that running another instance of your script on a new machine (or 2k of them) is trivial. No need to wait to provision a new VPS. Starting and stopping jobs is fast, so scaling up/down is fast. (I'm swear I'm not affiliated with them. I'm using it for a side project at the moment and have been so excited about it, I want to spread the word.)
johncoltrane 14y ago
I registered progrss.net a few years ago in the hope of creating a "smart" RSS reader that could help me (and others, possibly for a fee) save time by passing my feeds through easy to set up filters. The idea, sounded good, the mockups and and the prototypes looked good, it was fast and easy to use, the UX was distinctly different from all the others… but I grew tired of RSS as a whole and of woking on progrss.net. Now I don't use RSS anymore and my project was already pretty much stalled when NewsBlur was first announced here. The day Google announced they retired Reader was "missed opportunity day", over here. Anyway, good luck to you.
tehwalrus 14y ago
well done with keeping this app running! I switched from Reader as soon as I noticed, and I've been reading my feeds through NewsBlur the last couple of days with no problems (after an initial setup delay)! I have a couple of comments on how the UI works, but I'll consider those as time goes by and send you more specific feedback then (mostly I'm annoyed by things that work differently to google reader, so I'll hang back and see if they convince me...)
LargeWu 14y ago
Waiting for the day that NewsBlur becomes so successful that they get acquired by Google.

422 points by conesus 14y ago

zheng 14y ago

It must have been an intense mix of fear and excitement trying to fix anything and everything that broke, but NewsBlur deserves it IMO. It is a great product, and I think this post makes it clear that he cares about his users' experience.

recuter 14y ago

I'd just like to point out that '$24/yr * high four-figures of paying costumers' with only one employee ensures NewsBlur will be around for a long time. :) This is the kind of single founder "life style" startup that VC's would paw-paw that is Doing It Right that many of us aspire to. The other ones I can think of are Pinboard and Instapaper. I'd rather go this route, personally, here's to more like these. Cheers.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down. Pinboard and now Newsblur.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Quick, someone make a search engine!
  - vineet 14y ago
    See https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ :-)
- misiti3780 14y ago
  but delicious is still around, it was never shutdown, and from what i can tell, is better (from a functionality perspective) and has a bigger community than pinboard. the site design of pinboard alone turns me off to it
- boyter 14y ago
  Thats actually a really good idea. I wonder what would be next? Most of Yahoo's properties seem be be neglected at the moment, but what about Google? Google News perhaps?
  - bobdvb 14y ago
    flikr -> openphoto
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Probably Google Alerts. It's rather niche but people who use it absolutely rely on it. But the VC-funded Mention seems poised to take that one.
    - frankdenbow 14y ago
      I have been using warble.co recently, which does alerts for twitter
    - MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
      Google Alerts is a good candidate. Pardon anecdotal evidence, but the people in my circles who rely on it are executives who watch for their own names, or brand managers who watch for coverage of their company. This information is very valuable and I'm sure a good service could charge a nice premium.
      - darkspaten 14y ago
        I've received some deliverables from a marketing team which uses the following service for just such a purpose (at a nice premium) @ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-media-monitoring/ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-med...
amix 14y ago
With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.
- klox 14y ago
  3400 is only the number of new paying users in the last 24 hours. The amount of annual income from this product will now end with "million".
  - meh02 14y ago
    LOL, no. After the Reader-is-dead news cycle ends, the money will stop flowing, and the real work (supporting paying users) begins.
  - DuskStar 14y ago
    Oh, wow. I had not realized that number was the DAILY signups...
  - wilfra 14y ago
    revenue, not income - he's going to have high server costs now and if he wants to keep this scaling up, i suspect he'll need to bring on another person soon. at the very least, a customer service rep. still should easily net him a nice recurring six figure salary.
    - klox 14y ago
      Currently adding over 4k paid users per day. He reaches $1 million at just over 40k paid users. Factor in the userbase he's already been building for 4 years, the hundreds of thousands of Google Readers currently leaving, the millions that will need to find a replacement before July, and the last-minute movers on July 1st. I don't think server costs and a couple of employees will put him below a 7 figure income.
- recuter 14y ago
  > "Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally)". That's at least $200,000/yr with high margins.
overshard 14y ago
I agree, this is a great model. To shameless plug myself I plan on doing the same with Pinry: http://getpinry.com/ http://getpinry.com/
mikeash 14y ago
It does make the truck number rather low. This is still probably less of a risk than trusting Google to keep a marginal product around (as recent events demonstrate), but there are different risks for small organizations that big ones don't share.

carterschonwald 14y ago

Props on having an exciting validating road over the next few months! Likewise, what are some of the engineering things you'd really like some of the more dev heavy users to maybe help via pull requests with? :) (I see that the github issues list is relatively short)

electic 14y ago

I tried out NewsBlur and sadly, Feedly seems leagues better.

Roritharr 14y ago
Could you atleast describe what is better about Feedly, so not only the creator of NewsBlur, but also anyone looking to spend money on an RSS Solution gets your informed input?
- lazugod 14y ago
  I briefly tried both. * Feedly has a simple interface which is much more like Google Reader. But it depends on a plugin (or an app) rather than being an allwhere accessible website. Their Kindle Fire app seemed to load content extremely slowly, and its interface wasn't a simple list. And it's free, so I can't be a customer and I don't know how they earn money. * NewsBlur is complicated and unresponsive. There are a lot of inscrutable unlabeled icons, and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse. It's a paid service - I can be a customer - but I don't know how sustainable NewsBlur will be with its current issues and with subscription as its only source of funding. If NewsBlur seems solid by May, I'll gladly pay them. If Feedly seems less like a faceless data-miner by May, I'll use them.
  - korg250 14y ago
    "and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse." Really? It is a feature for better reading, so you can can easily see which line you are.
    - bsg75 14y ago
      Make sense now that someone points it out! For those who mouse click to mark reading point.
      - glenra 14y ago
        Aha. It somehow hadn't occurred to me to click on that triangle. I'm still not sure it's a useful-to-me feature, but it at least makes a little more sense now. It's less annoying once locked down, anyway. Maybe it should default to being locked down somewhere and only unlock the first time you click on it, rather than default to floating around freely.

Maven911 14y ago

Hi, So i have noticed that you are very forthcoming with data, such as providing the number of premium users on your webpage, and I hope you continue this - I really hope you become more succesful with this Google Reader debacle going on. 1) Why are you open about the number of users ? (personally I think its great) 2) How do the real-time stats work, I notice that the amount of regular users was over 20k a few days ago, and now its 8k. Are these the users who have used the client/service in the past 24 hours ? (and not the actual total amount of users)

DuskStar 14y ago
From another comment, those numbers appear to be the new signups in the last 24 hours - and as the free option became much harder to find recently, I would expect the number of free signups to decrease dramatically.
- Semaphor 14y ago
  > and as the free option became much harder to find recently That's only temporary though.

conesus 14y ago

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow? ... <snip: barriers to entry> ... That's the barrier to entry. Not how hard it is to switch in: it's how hard it might be to switch out. And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently. Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology. If you know that in the absolute worst case that you can still use the product even if it's shut down, then by golly, you have even less of a reason to not switch to it.

mynegation 14y ago
I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed. Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given that you indicated that low barriers to entry are important to you. I am not a web developer so that can partially explain my struggle with fabric, Django and multitude of webdev and devops modules that you use. I wish you good luck and I hope that you take this wonderful product even further.
- conesus 14y ago

mynegation 14y ago

I wonder what Samuel's attitude towards taking external financing is. Because NewsBlur is having a hell of a momentum on Google Reader news (pun not intended).

conesus 14y ago
I was in YC's Summer 2012 batch, so you be the judge. :-)
Maxious 14y ago
NewsBlur was funded as part of YCombinator Summer '12 http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-reading-back-to-th http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-readi... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurblogs-roy-and-y-combinator http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl...
recuter 14y ago
Well now that he has a graph pointing up and to the right he can certainly raise money and collect developers as if they were Pokemon and play games with the valuation in the hopes that somebody Acquihires Newsblur or buys them for some opaque strategic reasons. Maybe Google will buy them! :) Edit: I kid, but that's actually a possibility in my mind and would be an ironic outcome. Maybe Facebook or Yahoo or somesuch will see the value of having the New Reader. Selfishly, I am hoping for something else.
- rdl 14y ago
  IMO the best acquirer would be someone who wanted credibility among high-end technical users or journalists, not someone who wanted to turn it into a mass-market thing. If I were Palantir, I'd probably drop $250k/yr to run the World's Best RSS Reader for the kind of research analysts who become Palantir customers, and the kind of geeks who make awesome Palantir employees. There are maybe a hundred companies you could substitute for Palantir here. Seriously ironic that both of the likely Reader successors are YC funded (Feedly and Newsblur)
- thefuturewasnow 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

niggler 14y ago

Congratulations on being well-positioned and ready to handle the onslaught when Google announced that they were axing Reader. You clearly were "where the puck will be" :)

btbuildem 14y ago

Congrats! Enjoy the ride..

jpwagner 14y ago

So far I am not a user of ANY reader. Between googlenews, twitter, and HN I get my daily digest. I would like to try Newsblur but it seems that to get immediate value I have to have been some reader user: I can migrate my googlereader account or upload an OPML file. What I would like to see are different versions of OOTB "skins". I can sign up as an "HN-lover" and it seeds my account with 50 blogs I should follow. Then I can actually evaluate the product. Also note that free accounts are not actually disabled. If you leave the session when you hit the paywall and login from the homepage, you now have a free account.

conesus 14y ago
As I mentioned on Twitter, if you want a free account but can't get around the paywall, just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise...
- saraid216 14y ago
  > just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise... This is my new favorite typo.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    I don't think that's a typo.
jpwagner 14y ago
In other words: does anyone with a reader setup they love want to share their OPML file so I can try out Newsblur? Thanks!
- thefuturewasnow 14y ago
  here is a link to mine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/afksdrwxc1f0thq/subscriptions.xml https://www.dropbox.com/s/afksdrwxc1f0thq/subscriptions.xml
18pfsmt 14y ago

klox 14y ago

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" Congratulations. This is why I love SaaS. 6 figures revenue in a couple of days, and I can only imagine how much more will be made in the next 3 months... and beyond. But it's not a once-off payday. This is recurring. 7 figure annual income is yours, Sam. People slave away for decades trying to reach a tiny fraction of this amount. Put it to good use, brother.

LargeWu 14y ago
"6 figures revenue in a couple of days" Those couple of days took 4 years of preparation.
- klox 14y ago
  Yes. Which is why the first line of my comment literally reads "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity".

rdl 14y ago

I'm interested in your decision process in picking Reliable and then Digital Ocean.

conesus 14y ago
Originally price, now price + API for deploying new instances. If you check out my fabfile.py script you'll see that I have EC2 setup and ready but I don't use it because it costs more, runs slower, and is a pain in the butt to maintain.
- rdl 14y ago
  Oh, I meant vs. spending $20k on hardware, or partnering with someone like Softlayer/Rackspace as a promotional thing (I suspect either would be willing to give you a great deal to use as a marketing case)
  - jcampbell1 14y ago
    My guess... DO offers hardware in 60 seconds. Also cheaper/faster than EC2.
- your_perception 14y ago
  I am guessing you're using DO VPS for very specific purposes. I have a VPS on it myself, but they do not provide any way for VPSes to network with each other, which is annoying for multi-host setups. If you have them communicating with each other, I'd appreciate it if you shared your approach. And congrats on your increased traffic.
  - conesus 14y ago
    It's the one manual step I have to do. After I provision a server, I copy the IP and stick it in a few places (my fabfile, my hosts file that I then re-copy to every other machine, and my HAProxy config). While I do provision new servers regularly, I don't auto-scale, so I don't have a need for pure automation. It would be nice, but that's something I look into when I learn about new deployment procedures.

momonga 14y ago

Thanks for providing this service and having such great communication with users!

mamcx 14y ago

Do you have a API? I was building a news reader for iOS when !kaput! Google reader (I was in the middle of integrate it). Now I wonder what to do next. I love to support another "small" players like yours...

conesus 14y ago
You bet I do: http://www.newsblur.com/api http://www.newsblur.com/api. I would love to hear about your ideas. I feature a number of third-party extensions and apps written against NewsBlur's API on the Goodies page.

steve19 14y ago

Will you be adding a Google Reader compatible API? (So existing Google Reader apps can quickly switch to NewsBlur)

nicw 14y ago
You can do this currently. My feeds were quickly ingested and everything worked great.
- Semaphor 14y ago
  In case you wonder why you are getting downvoted: He is asking about a compatible API for 3rd party apps (Reeder, gReader and so on) to be able to connect to newsblur just by changing the API URL.
  - nicw 14y ago
    Ah ha, thanks :) Woke up this morning and was wondering why. Was a late night post.

sdfjkl 14y ago

That was surprisingly clueful of PayPal. Usually that part of the story is way more dramatic and ends up with alternate payment options.

dangrossman 14y ago
Only in the stories. The majority of situations where PayPal calls probably end just like this. I've taken that call myself and didn't have a problem. The stories we read are almost all about people doing things they shouldn't with any payment processor; that's why it only gets worse when the processor learns the details.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  Agreed, when the company I work for was just one guy, he had the same thing. They put a hold on funds (he had a lot of declined payments, nothing dodgy, just users not knowing how to use company credit cards), but as soon they'd checked all the paperwork they released it after a few weeks.

qoo 14y ago

"I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur." And then the black swan event comes. And then fire everywhere.

jbackus 14y ago
Same paragraph: > I did not expect it to come this soon.
misiti3780 14y ago
ironically, black swans, by their very nature, are in fact unpredictable (at least according to Nassim Tabeb) :)

randall 14y ago

I want to buy! Take my money! But your site errors out after CC deets. :(

habosa 14y ago

Can I possibly buy a month or two at a time? I want to try it out without buying a whole year. I know that's cheap of me, but I'll probably be trying a few RSS readers in the near future.

rodgerd 14y ago

<blockquote>The inevitable file descriptor limits on Linux means that for every database connection you make, you use up one of the 1,024 file descriptors that are allocated to your process by default. Changing these limits is not only non-trivial, but they don’t tend to stick.</blockquote> You're clearly a talented programmer, but perhaps employee #2 should be a sysadmin.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Maven911 14y ago

If i understood the numbers correctly, newsblur has went from 1500 paying/50000 free users to 6500 paying/110000 free users?

tempestn 14y ago

A tad off topic, but I'm hoping the fastest way to get an answer: How does one move or delete multiple feeds at once in newsblur? There must be a way to do this, right? Say I import 100 feeds from an OPML file, then realize I actually want them all in a folder. At the moment the only way I can figure out how to do that is to click on each feed, click move to folder, click the folder dropdown box, click the folder I want, click save. Times 100. Or I can save one click each by deleting them all then re-importing. But there must be a faster way. (In Google Reader settings, one could filter all folders with a keyword pattern, and bulk move.)

Semaphor 14y ago
Heh, wondered that myself yesterday after I realized my OPML contained old feeds for some reason. Reimporting feeds will delete your current feeds :)
- tempestn 14y ago
  Hmm.. that would be helpful. Unfortunately it looks like there are some bugs to iron out. Twice in a row now, I've created a folder, then in the folder menu got to add feeds to that folder, imported an opml file, and... the folder disappears and the feeds go into the root.
VLM 14y ago
I had a nearly identical experience. I took it as a spring cleaning moment and deleted about 10 basically dead or no longer interesting feeds. So it took about 2 hours, but most of it was mental processing, reviewing recent posts (if any) and thinking about each feed for about a minute. UI improvements would be cool, but spring cleaning still would have burned about 2 hours anyway.

TheTaytay 14y ago

Sam, congrats! For a task a parallelizable as fetching feeds, I can't recommend Picloud.com enough. You can ssh into a box, provision it however you want, save that image off, and then run arbitrary commands/scripts on instances of that image, on the CPU type you want, and pay only for the seconds of usage you have. (Their "s1" core type is $0.04/hour: http://www.picloud.com/pricing/ http://www.picloud.com/pricing/ ) They also have a system that lets you mount the same shared "drive" from multiple instances at the same time, so if you're doing file-based stuff, it's easy. The thing I like about it is that running another instance of your script on a new machine (or 2k of them) is trivial. No need to wait to provision a new VPS. Starting and stopping jobs is fast, so scaling up/down is fast. (I'm swear I'm not affiliated with them. I'm using it for a side project at the moment and have been so excited about it, I want to spread the word.)

johncoltrane 14y ago

I registered progrss.net a few years ago in the hope of creating a "smart" RSS reader that could help me (and others, possibly for a fee) save time by passing my feeds through easy to set up filters. The idea, sounded good, the mockups and and the prototypes looked good, it was fast and easy to use, the UX was distinctly different from all the others… but I grew tired of RSS as a whole and of woking on progrss.net. Now I don't use RSS anymore and my project was already pretty much stalled when NewsBlur was first announced here. The day Google announced they retired Reader was "missed opportunity day", over here. Anyway, good luck to you.

tehwalrus 14y ago

well done with keeping this app running! I switched from Reader as soon as I noticed, and I've been reading my feeds through NewsBlur the last couple of days with no problems (after an initial setup delay)! I have a couple of comments on how the UI works, but I'll consider those as time goes by and send you more specific feedback then (mostly I'm annoyed by things that work differently to google reader, so I'll hang back and see if they convince me...)

LargeWu 14y ago

Waiting for the day that NewsBlur becomes so successful that they get acquired by Google.