I laughed at Posterous, but they proved me wrong

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/i-dont-laugh-at-startup-ideas-anymore

by mgrouchy • 16 years ago

186 78 16 years ago

blog.dustincurtis.com

csallen• 16 years ago

I'd be interested in some stats on how many Posterous posts are made by email vs being made on the site itself. I've got a Posterous and I've yet to make a post by email. My reasoning is that making a blog post is such an involved task that I'm not deterred by the process of logging in and doing it from their site.

The main draw of Posterous to me has been the quality: The blogs look great as-is, they have a powerful HTML/CSS editor, the comments are great, etc.

solutionyogi• 16 years ago

You must be very different than I am. I used to have Wordpress hosted blog which I would not update as much as I would like to. Reason? Whenever I was in the Wordpress 'New Post' window, I would worry about post formatting, title of the post, my potential readers etc. than about writing what's in my head at the moment.

With Posterous, if there is any idea/thought in my head, I simply write down an email and send it to post@posterous.com. If I have images to post, instead of uploading them one by one, I simply forward them to Posterous and hey, I get a nice image gallery on my blog. Even better, with Posterous' iPhone app, I could send any interesting picture straight from my camera to my blog. What I realized that I had created lot of artificial barrier to updating my blog and Posterous took it all away. I use Posterous exclusively through email (unless I need to delete/fix post) and I think it rocks!

iamwil2• 16 years ago

Depends on what you're writing about. For a while, I never used the email posts, because it wasn't adequate to handle my code blogging. That's changed since Chris implemented markdown.

If you just write text and post pictures, email is great.

ComputerGuru4• 16 years ago

You can post to WP via email.

mikeleeorg• 16 years ago

One of the strengths of Posterous is that it offers a good solution to both approaches. If you like the ease-of-publishing via email, it can do it. Web? Got that too. How about via an iPhone or Android? Check.

In Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma, he discusses two types of disruptive innovations:

1) Low-end disruptions

These serve less demanding customers with low-priced, relatively straightforward offerings using low-cost business models. Look for markets with over-served customers and offer a simpler product or service.

2) New-market disruptions

These serve new customers by making it easier for them to do something that previously required being or hiring specialists. Look for unfulfilled needs and create new products or services for them.

Posterous is a great example of a low-end disruption. They're offering a product so damn simple that few realized it would have such an impact (like Dustin Curtis). And now they've got features that early adopters and perhaps some early majority want as well (the rich-text editor). Pretty shrewd of them.

njharman• 16 years ago

>if there is any idea/thought in my head, I simply write down an

Sounds more like twitter/facebook updates. Believe there is a higher quality bar for blog posts.

> I would worry about post formatting, title of the post, my potential readers etc.

That's what I do and more (multiple drafts) when writing most blog posts. I expect bloggers I read regularly to at least attempt the same.

josefresco2• 16 years ago

Since we're sharing ... I recently setup a personal Posterous blog so I could photo blog my eating habits using my ancient WinMo phone. I have a WordPress blog which I could have used (WP has post via email built in) but the Posterous system was just so simple I went with it instead.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

If I'm away from my computer, I use email, but if I'm at the computer, I always post from the admin interface.

Honestly, I think this is more of an indictment of the current state of desktop email than anything wrong with Posterous.

swombat• 16 years ago

I do all my postings on Posterous by email, as do the rest of my team. Email posting is the main reason we switched our company blog to Posterous, actually.

paulgb• 16 years ago

I used posterous to keep my family and friends updated when I was on a backpacking trip recently. The e-mail posting feature was indispensable given the sporadic WiFi I had, since my Gmail app would cache the emails until it could send it. Anecdotal I know, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.

arturadib• 16 years ago

That's why I don't listen to anyone when it comes to assessing the viability of any product. Ask two random people (experts included!) and the odds of you getting diametrically opposite answers are pretty high.

Belief and perseverance is everything.

ekanes• 16 years ago

There is value to listening to what people say, but more important is watching what they do.

tricky• 16 years ago

- execution is everything.

d0m• 16 years ago

Isn't it easy to send an email and put whatever email we want as the sender? I was just wondering, does it means anyone could post on the post of someone else?

dcurtis• 16 years ago

I think they do some checking in the headers. It's not impossible to masquerade as someone.

But how many people want to maliciously post to some random person's Posterous blog? Probably not too many.

josefresco2• 16 years ago

If the system was ever adopted widely (which I presume the founders desire) I would imagine that spoof posting would be a huge problem if someone could pull it off.

stuntmouse• 16 years ago

All of the black hats who want to abuse numerous holes in your browser of choice?

They wouldn't necessarily even have to get you to click on a link. There have been numerous attacks against image processing libraries.

alex_c2• 16 years ago

I suspect blackhat SEOs would be all over it.

robinduckett2• 16 years ago

Actually, I hadn't read this comment! XD

MrGamma• 16 years ago

I don't think blackhats would be all over it, the links are completely invisible to a search engine...

Maybe Smear Campaign artists might take to it. Or spammers...

icey5• 16 years ago

Let's find out.

I've just created a posterous account at http://pmn.posterous.com

The email that I've authorized is paul@pmn.org

I've put one post on there, any other posts that appear are not from me.

(I should note, I use Posterous for some personal stuff and love the service. This isn't something I've been terribly concerned about yet.)

fierarul• 16 years ago

I see two posts already.

brlewis• 16 years ago

My welcome email from July 2008 has a prominent box that says, "Setting a password for your account is easy. It's optional, but here's why you should..."

What did you welcome email say?

icey5• 16 years ago

I just got this email from Posterous:

  ATTENTION: We noticed you're sending this from a different
  computer or location, so it won't get posted until we're 
  sure it's you. Please confirm that you sent this.

So, it looks like they've thought about this problem already.

davi• 16 years ago

TechCrunch had a contest about this when Posterous launched: http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/28/posterous-beats-tumblr-in-s...

Michael Arrington posted the results here: http://techcrunch.posterous.com/lots-of-fake-post-attempts-o...

snprbob86• 16 years ago

3 fake posts made it through. I'd consider > 0 a failure. I guess you could use a super secret From email address?

mcobrien• 16 years ago

"Apparently You don’t need a password. Posterous fail."

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/apparently-765

grandalf• 16 years ago

I think Posterous mostly succeeded because of its clean design and cool name, not because one can post by email.

alexro• 16 years ago

Plus YC involvement. Post by email feature was the reason to talk about Posterous though

flubba• 16 years ago

Which seems like it just gave Posterous publicity. Trendiness + Reinventing the wheel = Success?

iamwil2• 16 years ago

Those helped, but no, posting by email was defn a win. You could attach any type of media or put the url of the youtube video in the email, and it'll make it look nice for you. No more embed codes.

scott_s• 16 years ago

From the article, Post-by-email is Posterous' core essence, and the simplicity of that central feature has leaked to all other parts of the service making it an awesome product to use.

The author's argument is that the attitude of "email is the simplest way to post to a blog" is part of why the rest of the design is clean.

jgoewert3• 16 years ago

Posting by email makes complete sense. Think of how many office workers spring upon something they want to post, but opening a webbrowser may be tracked or their boss may see or something.

Though, having it be the driving selling feature... I would have found that quite ridiculous. But, what do I know, I am over 30. My ideas about what the current youth generation want is outdated. I didn't even think like most of them when I was that age.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

  Posting by email makes complete sense

Yes... in hindsight.

BrandonM• 16 years ago

I honestly thought that blogging by email made a lot of sense before I heard of Posterous. Of course, their implementation of it is pretty great.

Another blogging interface that makes sense to me is a message board. Each blogger would have a forum (subforums would be allowed and would represent all of that blogger's blogs). Each thread (the first post of the thread) in the forum represents a blog post, and others' replies to the thread become the blog comments.

I think that idea might have some legs, as it could help a lot with discoverability. But what do I know?

jgoewert3• 16 years ago

I didn't know it was so new of a feature. I've been using email article publishing since back when PostNuke was the hot web publishing tool.

But, it seems to be wrapping around as the "new hot tech" again because this generation of users has forgotten about it.

famfam3• 16 years ago

Right, because your boss couldn't possibly be tracking Exchange Server.

On that note, it would be a neat trick if Posterous handled encrypted mail...

loup-vaillant• 16 years ago

I have a simple counter. A personal smtp server, set to listen some non-standard port, set up to do TLS. The mail isn't encrypted, and your boss can still say that you sent mails if he dig up a bit, but he won't spy the content of the e-mails anyway.

Just don't make the mistake I did: forget to set up your imap server to use TLS as well.

jgoewert3• 16 years ago

Well, yeah, you always have tracking.

What I was more imagining is where if you are in some cube-hell and your boss walked by and saw you on some website typing away, it is easily recognizable. But if you had Outlook up, typing away, it isn't near as noticeable.

One of those office work things, sort of like how old video games had a Boss key.

I've seen enough people doing slack-off stuff like this.

redorb• 16 years ago

I think Posterous is winning based on the many factors below; but the one I see most prominently is that a ton of YC startups use them as their company blog.

wdewind3• 16 years ago

How does posterous make/plan to make money?

famfam3• 16 years ago

I thought it was by hijacking all your non-affiliated affiliate links?

wdewind3• 16 years ago

So this means finding all the places I have a link to an amazon.com book and rewriting the URL with posterous's affiliate id?

can anyone confirm/deny this? I've thought of using something like that for other ideas and wonder if it works, and if so at what volume you need etc.

rubinelli2• 16 years ago

I remember paid subscriptions mentioned in the interview with Calacanis. Freemium tends to work well with this kind of service.

wdewind3• 16 years ago

Can you expand on this? IE: Would someone pay to host their blog, or would someone pay to get access to someone else's blog? I've always been really curious about Posterous, Tumblr and all the others who come up against this problem (ie: great product with tons of users who love it and no clear monetization).

lhorie2• 16 years ago

>> To use Posterous, all you have to do is send one email. You don’t even need to create an account; just email post@posterous.com and they link it to your email address automatically. Because you’re the only person with access to your email, you don’t even need a password on Posterous.

I don't know anything about their blogging service, but as far as registering for services goes, this idea is gold.

india• 16 years ago

What about spoofed emails? Come to think of it, how does posterous handle that? One way would be to mail the user back asking them to reply to confirm and then recording the details of the genuine mail server. Does posterous do that?

On the whole there is a lot to get wrong in this authentication method. I would prefer if this doesn't spread to other web apps.

enjo• 16 years ago

http://posterous.com/faq

Addresses some of those issues.

lhorie2• 16 years ago

From their faq page:

>> Email can easily be spoofed, but Posterous has come up with some ways to figure out if the email we receive comes from you. If we think it might not be you, we ask you to confirm the email before we post it.

No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn't do it.

u48998• 16 years ago

Posterous email-to-post idea was so simple that it was confusing at the same time. We then saw that they introduced bookmarklet and other standard blogging features. Which to me suggest that not many people are using post-to-email feature even though it is now available at every other micro-blogging services. The simplicity of design almost always works in your favor though.

sdh• 16 years ago

For me, the most important point here is about how difficult it is for existing companies to change directions in product vision and yet investors will shy away from innovation based on the flawed "what if <huge company> decides to do this?"

The tech landscape is never fully conquered and all it takes is one inspired, and sometimes obvious, innovation to open the field back up.

OmarIsmail• 16 years ago

This is a very good point. One of the most common questions that startups get is "why can't big company Y do X?" and yet time and time again startups succeed in such a space. Of course there are cases where company Y does do X, notably Amazon, Twitter and Facebook. So I think the question or answer needs to reflect the history of the particular companies in question.

And even then. A lot of times Company X does implement Y and it doesn't kill or even slow the startup down. There are probably many reasons behind this. Fundamentally though I think people should just stop asking this question. Or not treat it as such a big deal. Because it's not in the grand scheme of things.

gaborcselle• 16 years ago

There must be a few more ideas out there where you take something that already exists, improve it by changing one of the variables, add some charming cofounders, add the YC audience, and net out a successful startup.

lazyant• 16 years ago

Silly question: what's the advantage of Posterous versus say, Tumblr? With Tumblr you can also post by email, it has templates and free domain redirect.

phreanix2• 16 years ago

So does WP, and blogger I believe.

It really is up to the user/s to decide what best suits them. The advantage is the choice

lurkinggrue• 16 years ago

No password? How do they deal with spoofed email?

photomatt2• 16 years ago

I'd be happy to share the usage stats of WP.com's post-by-email feature if Posterous would be willing to do the same.

pmjoyce• 16 years ago

Why not tell us anyway?

photomatt2• 16 years ago

Because I'm curious!

ComputerGuru4• 16 years ago

Hey Matt! Long time!

I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in those numbers. I always assumed a tiny percentage of the WP userbase would employ that particular feature since it's kinda geeky... but definitely would like to know because it does have may implications for other webapp owners.

PS: Congrats on the 3.0 release :) Will be upgrading a couple of sites tomorrow.

billclerico• 16 years ago

i snap photos on my iphone and then email them in. awesome. easier than launching another app.

zeynel1• 16 years ago

What happens if I want to create another posterous blog with the same email, is that possible?

dous• 16 years ago

You can have multiple blogs associated with the same email. I'm just not sure if it's possible to create a new one by sending an email as the first post.

I laughed at Posterous, but they proved me wrong

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