Posterous (YC S08) raises ~4.4M from Redpoint, Trinity, and angels | Hacker News Reader

Posterous (YC S08) raises ~4.4M from Redpoint, Trinity, and angels

blog.posterous.com

106 pointspmjordan25 comments

Congrats! My interview with Garry Tan (founder) from three days ago: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/garry-tan-on-get...

I'm interviewing Satish Dharmaraj (lead investor) on Monday. These interviews are on getting traction.

I'm trying posterous right now for the first time.

First impressions:

* It got the possessive of my name, Peteris, wrong. If the name ends in -is (or -us), the possessive is Peteris’ not "Peteris’s posterous". (Rule 1 from "The Elements of Style".)

* I am not sure why it needed me to validate my email, if I already sent the first mail from my mail and then signed up via the URL in the mail that came back. But it wasn't difficult so ok.

* Regging was really quick. Quickest I have ever had.

* Had a dot in the first post's title, it got deleted in the URL. Would have liked if it was rather replaced by a dash.

I like it overall. I am not going to use it actively as I already have a blog but I would if I hadn't as it gets you blogging in no time.

The possessive thing actually varies according to stylebooks. The Chicago Manual of Style says to use 's in this circumstance (doesn't fall into one of its exceptions for when to omit the 2nd s), and the MLA Handbook says to always use 's for possessives of singular nouns.

Oh, I see. Didn't know that.

And the Oxford Guide to Plain English (which I recommend) says that both are correct.

Thanks for the feedback -- this is helpful. The registration step is part of our security, tough to get around if you look at all the possible cases.

My biggest beef with Posterous's design is that they direct me to their front page too often. When I'm logged in, just take me to my blogs. How many times have I ever seen the front page of blogger?

I hear you. We've got some cool concepts on a dashboard coming... we literally just grew the team by 50% people (2 great engineers) in the last couple of weeks, so we hope to be putting out a lot more good stuff for you.

Mine is that with ordinary text emails, it will make very ugly HTML code, like putting hard breaks instead of proper HTML paragraphs (even though it shouldn't be that hard to do, with properly formatted emails). I wouldn't care about that much, but when somebody looks at the site with unexpectedly large fonts (and not even very large, with common 67 columns paragraphs and default posterous themes, it happens quite too often), the browser will break lines sooner than the hard break, and then again at the next line, after few characters. That sort of sucks.

How does Posterous make money?

It is such a cool service that VCs will keep it free forever!

Deleted comment

I think you missed the sarcasm there...

They're starting to make some from sites for corporations, but the only one I know of is this:

http://ncaa.cocacolazero.com/

http://blog.posterous.com/advertising-agency-crispin-porter-...

There was a TechCrunch story that referred to it as "jumping on the revenue wagon", so they're definitely getting money out of it, but it was written by Daniel Brusilovsky, the 17-year-old intern that extorted startups, and they deleted all of his articles when they terminated him.

Edit: Google cache of the TechCrunch article: http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:bi6GJIQbFY0J:www.techcr...

Why do they need such money?

Build more stuff, Marketing, Back office support. Poking around with what you could do with email would be constructive. They nailed down email to blogs going so how about the other way around. For example, I'm starting to get a lot of magazines sent to me by email and I want them somewhere else so how about picking them up from email and placed to a magazine folder on the desktop automatically. Click on the magazine folder object sends you to the article.

Excellent idea. Would love that feature for the tons of email magazines I subscribe to.

At first I was very skeptical. Who needs another blogging platform (tumblr works fine, thank you).

But now that I'm on the road, Posterous does have one big advantage: It works offline too. I use Mail.app to write and when I finally get a reliable connection -- it automatically uploads the new post.

Great work. Thanks guys!

I love Posterous and post something there every day. Huge congrats!

Who says email is dead?

Congrats!

Huge congrats to the Posterous team. I'm a total convert after I started to use posterous to keep track of Startup related news in the Mission District in SF. Absolutely love the simplicity of the experience and can't wait to see what's next.

Congrats! Amazing how they continue to crank out new features

w00t! Congrats guys!

Notes On Posterous Founder http://mixergynotes.com/sachin-agarwal-posterous/

WIN

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