Six Months of Pinboard | Hacker News Reader

Six Months of Pinboard

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49 pointswyclif24 comments

I have been using pinboard for 6+ months, excellent service, does exactly what you want a bookmarking service to do. And, Maceiej and PVG are very responsive.

Glad to hear you're finding the service useful. Beside eliminating spam and keeping growth manageable, the 'every user is a paying user' model is a very effective motivator for providing prompt response to customer feedback, bug reports, feature requests, etc.

  >> Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users,
  >> we store copies of all bookmarks in an account for $25 per year
  >> the site has reached the point where I can work on it full-time

That's pretty impressive, low living costs?

Lets say 1% sign up to premium, that's 12 premium accounts, @ $25/yr for a total of $300/year or $25/month :/

Cool to see this sort of post though, and great to hear peoples progress etc.

More likely he may be referring to 1200 premium accounts. or even if it is simply 1200 accounts, assuming 1% conversion rate is a bit on lower end. I will more optimistically estimate it to be around 10%.

All pinboard users pay a small fee to sign up (deductible from the archiving sub, should they sign up for that). This allows us to feed Maciej more than one bowl of gruel every three days.

Additional income comes from signup - current fee is $5.69 to join. They increase the cost by $0.001 each time a user signs up. (not where they started the price, but assuming $0.01 that could be another $16190.90)

I like the idea of charging a nominal fee to signup (or perhaps just to have a "pro" account)

Ah sorry, I missed that :) Interesting.

How do you get $16k :/

Avg price = ($5.69 + ($5.69 - $0.001 * 1200)) / 2

= $5.09

$5.09 * 1200 = $6,108

1200 is not the total number of users.

ah. The important word being '1200 active users'?

I'll stop trying to over analyze now :)

Congrats on growth so far anyway

Thanks! And you're right, it's active users and I think they were defined as 'used in last 30 days' in the draft Maciej showed me but it seems to have somehow dropped out of the final post.

As to over-analyzing, it's the meat and potatoes of HN. I'd be happy to clarify or answer any questions (best posted at top level as HN likes to assume deep-nesting is a sign of a dreadful flame-war and imposes its timed lockouts).

$5.69 means that they have increased the price by $0.001 5690 times.

    prices = (1..5690).collect { |member| member * 0.001 }
    prices.inject(0) { |price, sum| price + sum }

Does Pinboard have a Firefox extension (or plans for one)? I'd love to have an alternative to Delicious, but the smoothness of their Firefox integration is so good it not only keeps me using Delicious, it also keeps me using Firefox.

Some reasons I like it so much:

* Ctrl-D to bookmark, just like vanilla Firefox

* Ctrl-D on an already-bookmarked page to edit tags / description for that page

* Ctrl-B for an always-up-to-date bookmark pane, with FAYT by title or tag

* "Open in tabs" for any tag (I use this daily for the webcomic update-checking ritual, and occasionally for actually useful things)

* Awesome Bar integration by title or tag (bit flaky but great when it works)

* Dropdowns for user-defined "favourite tags" in a menu bar (this plus a "todo" tag is almost as good, for me, as a natively supported "toread" feature)

It's something that's planned but I doubt it's going to be quite as heavyweight as the del one. Replacing the standard local bookmark shortcuts also seems a little intrusive to me. Open tag in tabs and and 'favourite tags' menu sound quite useful though.

The post URLs form is responsive generally compared to delicious' form which at times is totally unresponsive.

Feature point #1, "spare user interface" should be "sparse user interface"?

It's a user interface, not a matrix.

The only part of this I didn't really grok is that the blog says pvg was a co-founder of del.icio.us. I always thought the co-founders were @joshu and Pete Frietas.

Apparently not... http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2005/05/yeah_sure_consi.html

Pinboard is correct, pvg was there.

Who is Pete Freitas? Where did you get that impression?

Random, non-thought provoking, press release in the shape of a blog.

The only semi-interesting (imo) tid-bit relayed is charging for services prevent spam, but that isn't new or uncommon.

Assuming he is being honest with the numbers, this is quite a disclosure in my opinion. It is certainly self-serving (as a company/product blog tends to be), but if you look beyond the back-patting there is some market insight here if you are following this space. (BTW I didn't downvote your post, you're entitled to feeling like there is nothing here, but I'm glad that I saw this article).

The numbers are accurate, perhaps because we lack the imagination to come up with a reason to make them up.

More seriously, this retrospective and status update is really directed at our users (as is the everything else on the blog). If others find something of interest there, all the better but the goal is not Great Insights Into Entrepreneurship™ or anything high-minded like that.

These sort of data-supported, direct insights into personal experiences in entrepreneuship are valid and excellent content.

I upvoted the article and downvoted you for your bad mood ;)

Yes I was in a bad mood when I wrote the above, but I feel my point still stands. There was very little meat of anything to gain. Yes you see 6 months they obtained 1200 users, and it's sufficient to support the operations, and they didn't take any VC money. There was nothing in the article about what they overcame to get to their position. Maybe they didn't and got very lucky, but luck is just one aspect of getting a company successfully running. I'd be more interested in a recap 1.5 years from now where they have had more growing pains, more trials, and more interesting successes.

Alternately just say you want me to check out a centralized bookmarking site.

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