Eight years of victory

https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/07/eight_years_of_victory/

by jjwiseman • 9 years ago

125 33 9 years ago

blog.pinboard.in

convertguy• 9 years ago

Just wanted to say: You're an inspiration, Maciej

idlewords5• 9 years ago

Thank you; that is very friendly!

GuiA• 9 years ago

Love everything that Pinboard is doing - both service and attitude wise. Great to have living examples of hackers doing what they love, without having to sell out to investors or a large company, all the while bringing in decent money.

All that said, I'm always surprised that Maciej racked in over $100k in revenue his first year. I was of the impression that your first 1-2 years are going to be in the red, unless you have something big to build on (existing business to promote your new one, big twitter following, etc.).

The fact that he has 10x the users now compared to the first year but only 2x the revenue is interesting. I assume that's due to moving the subscription fee to a small but ever incrementing amount to a larger, fixed one.

Any tips/prep advice for someone who has a business they want to launch but dread spending the first couple years making no money/having few users?

hmhrex• 9 years ago

I would also love to hear advice. I'm looking at starting a service soon, and I really love the way that Maciej handles things. One man show that built a service for himself, has grown it organically and seems to enjoy working on it still.

idlewords5• 9 years ago

The 100K was the first full year of operation (2010) and 80K of that came over a two-week period in December, when Yahoo announced it was 'sunsetting' my main competitor. The period from April 2009 to December 2010 was very lean. I don't have the figures handy, but it was a few hundred bucks a month at best.

bertman• 9 years ago

  I know there are lots of rival bookmarking services out 
  there to choose from.
  I will consume them all, like I consumed the pie.

I like the owner's style :)

smnscu• 9 years ago

You're in for a treat if you just learned about Maciej (https://xkcd.com/1053/). I've been an admirer of his writing for a long time.

http://www.idlewords.com/

https://blog.pinboard.in/

tren• 9 years ago

Nice job, Pinboard is great!

One question, how come the number of users has increased 10x, but revenue only ~2x. Has the pricing model changed over time?

dangrossman2• 9 years ago

It has. It used to be a one-time signup fee, now it's an annual subscription.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

Two years ago they changed pricing from a 1-time fee, to a recurring fee. So the majority of users are not a recurring revenue.

shubhamjain2• 9 years ago

I am 1.5-month Pinboard user and I have to say I am not particularly happy with the support. I admit that for $25 / year, providing full-text search + archiving is an excellent deal, but it's also incredibly frustrating when your problems don't get solved.

Archiving didn't work for me for first 3 days, so I sent an email, no response. Followed up 2 days later, no response. Contacted on Twitter, got a response that it'll be looked into, but it wasn't solved. Contacted on Twitter again 3 days later, no response. Finally, it did start working a few days later but stopped again.

I emailed again, no response. Followed up 4 days later, no response. Contacted on Twitter, no response. Emailed on founder's email 2 days later, no response. Another contact on Twitter, no response. I did get a response when I send a DM that the lack of response was due to huge impending work.

It's completely possible that the work was indeed huge and I was growing impatient (for that, I apologise), but I wasn't expecting that the problem is solved immediately but just how and when it'll be solved, that's all.

I didn't send any messages after that and it seems issues are slowly getting fixed. There are still issues with accessing the archived links, but I feel there won't be any point in reporting them. Pinboard is an excellent service that I use every day, but I wish there was more effort to make users feel less frustrated.

venning• 9 years ago

(Not affiliated with Pinboard or even a user.) If your problems occurred 1.5 months ago, the "huge impending work" was likely Pinboard buying Delicious [1] and subsequently being inundated with Delicious users attempting to onboard. Not an excuse, just context.

[1] https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...

prawn2• 9 years ago

FTA and in addition to venning's comment: "In November I began traveling extensively in support of Tech Solidarity, an attempt to mobilize tech workers after the US election. All the travel meant I sometimes ignored support emails for weeks at a time."

shubhamjain2• 9 years ago

I do sympathise with valid reason to not be able to respond. However, I think a minimum level communication should maintained in any kind of service. In this case, I don't think I would have been unhappy even with an autoresponder, but no response feels despairing.

riffraff• 9 years ago

for $25 / year

isn't the yearly cost $11 ?

sp332• 9 years ago

The archiving option is more expensive.

idlewords5• 9 years ago

The experience for new users has been very frustrating lately. There's no need for you to apologize.

My goal for the summer is to get things to a place where people don't have such a frustrating experience with me, or the site.

djhworld• 9 years ago

Pinboard user here.

I'm very good at archiving links, I use a chrome extension that just does it.

However I'm not so good at the recall side of things. This isn't pinboard's fault, it's just my habits. Right now I just throw links into a box with a few tags and then forget about it.

Maybe one day it will come in useful and I'm glad it's there.

geostyx• 9 years ago

I have the same issue. I usually just head to Google when I need to find something again...

kome2• 9 years ago

The best 6 dollars I ever spent...

negativ0• 9 years ago

what a terrible website, i'm still amazed how people can make money with such poor UX, i have to zoom the page at 175% to be able to read whats written there

kome2• 9 years ago

Such poor UX? Are you joking right? Pinboard UX is awesome and fast: just straight to the point. Font size is about 13pt: standard; just like HN.

oneeyedpigeon• 9 years ago

It's actually 13px, which is much smaller than 13pt. 16px (which is slightly smaller than 13pt) is pretty much the standard minimum.

Pinboard is great, but the UX could definitely do with some attention. It annoys me to the extent that one of my pet projects is a better front-end, using its API. As one small example, it's incredibly frustrating that I have to view page source to extract metadata (e.g. title + description) when adding a new URL, rather than pinboard just doing this for me.

dangrossman2• 9 years ago

I have to zoom HN 125-150% to read it comfortably. It's the only site I have a custom zoom level for.

factsaresacred• 9 years ago

Kudos to Pinboard. How he pulls it off with the almost non-existing support and without a(n official) mobile app is interesting, too.

Other apps have Intercom or some other support app telling you that you're special and promising you a reply in a few hours. Meanwhile Maciej doesn't reply to your emails or tweets.

And yet, growth.

Perhaps neglect is the secret sauce!

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

Perhaps chance is the secret sauce.

andrei_says_• 9 years ago

Perhaps being awesome, fully human and sincere with your users, and standing behind your service while providing an amazing narrative around your product is a part of the secret sauce.

idlewords5• 9 years ago

I don't like the idea of outsourcing support to strangers. I think it's more meaningful to have your email ignored by the founder.

maxfurman• 9 years ago

The big story this year was last month's surprise acquisition of Pinboard's long-time nemesis Delicious. This illustrates the importance of always having a backup nemesis.

I love Maciej's writing.

jtcond13• 9 years ago

Anyone else subscribe to Pinboard primarily to support Maciej's writing/organizing?

It's like the fair trade coffee of online bookmarking services.

Eight years of victory

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