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Tweet-for-license is a logical idea, but it feels too paid-for-compliment - even though people must be sincere, since they want the license... like Dropbox's re
by hyp0 13y ago
Tweet-for-license is a logical idea, but it feels too paid-for-compliment - even though people must be sincere, since they want the license... like Dropbox's referral program.
However, maybe google juice isn't that important for your market... if you can reach them in some more specific way, you don't need lots of freebie-loving hackers.
Also, there's a downside to lots of free users: by whetting the appetite of people who will never pay, you create a vacuum for a clone to fill.
PS: rmrfrmrf's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915104) comment on Heroku's plugins sounds close to "service components" I mentioned above. Building on his idea, http://pingdom.com http://pingdom.com offers free user alerts, and https://travis-ci.org/ https://travis-ci.org/ offers continuous integration testing via github hook - both have a free tier.
- mherrmann 13y agoTweet-for-license is working well so far, we'll see how it goes. And the required tweet "Trying #helium web automation (heliumhq.com)" is imho really not that much of a compliment. But obviously, we want something in return for giving away free(!) licenses. I can see your point of creating a "vacuum". Since we are giving away licenses for free now, the challenge will be to not let such a vacuum happen, yet create enough demand for businesses to pay for licenses. I really don't see us offering a hosted SaaS platform at the moment. I can see the advantages for the subscription model, but we're busy implementing Helium for languages other than Python, so don't have time to set up a platform. It's just not our core competency.