Two Years of Pinboard

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/07/two_years_of_pinboard/

by mcantelon • 15 years ago

103 33 15 years ago

blog.pinboard.in

shii• 15 years ago

Sub $3 adopters represent wut-wut.

Srsly though, thanks maciej and team, love pinboard and use it e'erday. It's pretty much second nature to highlight, right-click, 'Post Page to Pinboard', fill some pithy tags, and feel instant dopamine flood of peace for some reason. Great when I have that one site on the tip of my cerebellum that I can just grep through pinboard for. Way to go on the 2 years and coming years of success.

idlewords7• 15 years ago

Thank you!

kn0thing2• 15 years ago

Congrats on the success! A simple, elegant app that just gets shit done -- and with a revenue model.

Bit of a blast from the past here, but I want to thank you for some unintentional inspiration you gave me 6 years ago when Steve & I launched reddit. You see, I've always kept a "wall of negative reinforcement" (basically negative commentary that I print out and stick on the wall) that I find quite inspiring.

You deleted the post, but "Y Combinator’s 2005 Summer Founders Program: A Complete Dud" was one of the things that always gave me a boost during some of reddit's darker days.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050813233842/http://tech.rufy.c...

It may sound ridiculous, but I really do appreciate it. I've been fortunate to have had immensely supportive people in my life - namely my parents - yet I've always relished criticism & negative feedback (maybe it's from growing up with a girl's name?) as motivation to push myself harder to better both my work and myself. Thank you.

joshu3• 15 years ago

Pretty sure delicious was smaller than 27 million bookmarks just two years in.

Otoh, that was only 20-ish days of growth when I left yahoo...

johnx123-up• 15 years ago

Bookmarking concept was just evolved then.

shrikant• 15 years ago

Also, while the devs in the forums were really nice, it seemed like they couldn't just do anything about feature requests or bugs and had to wait for some sort of lordly blessing.

With Maciej it's pretty much drop an email to the mailing list, and if the request is reasonable enough, BAM, it's there!

heyimfromreddit2• 15 years ago

DigitalOne seems to offer much more than I get with Linode. Anyone have experience with them?

idlewords7• 15 years ago

Heh, yeah. You will certainly get a lot more than you do with Linode. Great host if you like adventure and hate to be bothered with status updates or receive credit in the event of an outage. Enjoy!

dorian-graph• 15 years ago

Who did you switch to after DigitalOne?

heyimfromreddit2• 15 years ago

Any alternatives you'd recommend?

dangrossman• 15 years ago

I get the "too good to be true" vibe from their pricing. Too much RAM for too little money compared to everyone reputable...

idlewords7• 15 years ago

Leaseweb offers similar pricing and is reputable. I had nothing but good things to say about DigitalOne until the FBI raid and their horrible handling of it.

It's 2011, high-RAM servers should be available for reasonable prices.

petercooper4• 15 years ago

FWIW, I have all my important stuff at Linode, but I also have a server from Hetzner in Germany. It costs €49 per month (about $60 I think) and it's a Core i7 with 8GB RAM. Their network has proven rock solid and the hardware totally fine in the last 6 months and I only got it because I had so many personal recommendations. I don't know how they can do it but clearly it's at least possible to offer serious power at bargain basement prices.

mise• 15 years ago

Congratulations.

It would be useful if you wrote beside the current figures Tue percentage change on last year.

It also struck me that linking the price to a growth factor may end up overpricing your service leading to a halt in signups. Is this the case or not?

idlewords7• 15 years ago

I avoid percentages because I think they can be a little silly when talking about small absolute numbers. I think we had just over 2k active users last year at this time, for what that's worth.

I am not worried about overpricing the site as long as I think the signup fee represents good value for new users.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

I really like maciej's writing style. Something about it that creates an instant feeling of rapport and sympathy.

zeemonkee• 15 years ago

Excellent product - been a happy customer for 6 months. The idea of increasing the price by a fraction per user is a good one - the more customers you have the more expensive it gets to run, but you also reward early adopters.

look_lookatme• 15 years ago

Sometimes when I feel blue about HN and what it has become, I refer to Dabblers and Blowhards for a little bit of levity. It was an essay before its time. Maciej is a fine writer and if I could recommend a single thing he's written it would be Scott and Scurvy (as much as I love Attacked By Thugs for comedic reasons).

JanezStupar• 15 years ago

Another happy customer here.

I wish more people would signup - since that would assure long term stability/security of my bookmark archive.

And GZ on your birthday Pinboard!

mrsolo• 15 years ago

I thought Pinboard was just another bookmarking site, they are not. Their archival account is something that I've been looking for as an alternative to Evernote, which is ok, but it is getting slower and less stable as my archive gets bigger. Pinboard is promising, competition is good.

leftnode• 15 years ago

I love Pinboard. The killer feature is Twitter integration. I do 99% of my Twitter browsing on my phone, and when I see a link that might be interesting, I just favorite it and Pinboard comes by and picks up those favorites for me to read later.

Very awesome service.

petercooper4• 15 years ago

The fee is based on the formula (number of users $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.*

The current price is $9.37 which indicates 9370 users, yet this post says 12,500 active. But if the first customer was $2.04, is it $2.04 + u * 0.001? So meaning $9.37 reflects 7330 users? Sorry for picking through the math but I'm interested in stuff like this :-) Did a big group of users get in free during a certain period, etc?

It's a beautiful business model in a way. It doesn't suit people who want to trial it out but the social proof of 12,000 people already being through the doors makes the $9 more palatable to latecomers. I'm wondering if I could apply a similar model to my e-mail newsletters (which people keep saying I should charge for).

idlewords7• 15 years ago

The multiplier has changed over time. It started out as a tenth of a penny and has been reduced several times, so you can't really math out without additional info. Not that it's stopped anyone.

petercooper4• 15 years ago

Ah, cunning! :-) (Or, more likely, a necessity to stop the signup fee being $100 by now ;-)) Good work.

Two Years of Pinboard

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