Hackpad shutting down
hackpad.com
hackpad.com
Why can't people just build products and ask for money upfront? Is bootstrapping really so out of fashion? The startup agenda is either make a billion dollar company or go home. Nothing in between. Very sad (I even saw Sam in some video last week asking 'how do you become a monopoly'?) Why this obsession to grow massive?
Because not enough users are willing to pay. The few which would pay won't even cover the increased support effort. But anyway if you come so far to learn this you already have been kind of successful, because usually it is impossible to get enough attention for your paid app anyway.
Source: I sell a program for $40.
The only app which I ever paid money for is Locus Map pro, which happens to be an app that only really makes sense to have on mobile.
I totally agree that when there's a free version and a paid/donation version hardly anyone is actually willing to pay though. The pay-once model is really good for the consumer... until the company goes out of business because they're not making any money. Which is why I also buy products that don't require an ongoing service!
You like them, but you are an unsustainable customer.
In many ways Dropbox Paper is like Hackpad 2.0, but it has different branding. Hackpad continued to run long after Dropbox bought them - for 3 years!
This is less of an "our incredible journey" then you think.
Imagine you have this nice business idea, which you have been working on for countless hours after work to make it become an awesome product. You sacrife your free time and maybe even health or friendships. You start to feel bad for every day you don't work on your product, as you know it all depends on you, and maybe a couple of co-founders. You know your product is great and it could make many customers happy. Yet what you earn from your it is peanuts and you don't see how this will change any time soon.
In that scenario, venture capital or a buy-out seem like a very appealing idea. After all, if you've come this far, it means that your product means a lot to you and you have more ideas than time. And suddenly knowing that you could get a decent amount of money to quit your "boring" daily job and make all these ideas come true gets even more interesting.
That burning desire to make your "baby" succeed should not be underestimated. That's why so many startups try hard to get a decent funding. I can't blame them, because I've been there. Heck, if a "big player" came to my little startup and offered a good deal, I would probably more than consider taking it. In the end, life is short and you can only build so many valuable things in your life that might have an impact and make a difference.
Still, I'm happy to have a fully bootstrapped startup that is not yet bringing enough money to quit my job. It is tough, it takes a lot of patience, and even more sacrifice every day. But also the prospect of making it profitable enough to have a small team that can work on your idea has a special kind of appeal. Not wanting to be the next Google or Facebook is a good thing in my opinion, but I understand that there is a lot of people who just burn with desire to push their ideas forward faster. Can't blame them for that.
Absolutely. This is why you have companies who have not proven to have a profitable business model, yet they are valued far higher than your small, bootstrapped startup. This is one more angle to look at it. I can happily claim that my tiny little bootstrapped startup is actually more profitable than Twitter :)
I haven't touched Hackpad in a long time and wasn't aware of the acquisition until this HN post. That said, even if I was a regular user I'd pass on the "upgrade" as I stopped using Dropbox for privacy reasons. I'd consider moving (back) to Etherpad more of an upgrade at this point.
How do you create cross links between pages in Paper?
>Why this obsession to grow massive?
It's not just startups. Every publicly traded company is focused on growth. You could have many billions of revenue and billions in profit, but if you aren't growing you're failing. I don't agree with this, but the stock market certainly does.
Maybe there's a skew but there's an underlying rationality to investors where ultimately you add up the money a company can pay out in dividends etc and work out what they're worth.
I'm far from an expert on this but there's even pressure in the opposite direction - for big companies, investors value a regular, predictable dividend, and can be wary of CEOs or directors with significant holdings who want to take risks and "empire build".
They can.
You just don't hear about them.
They tend to die fast.
Apart from app.net. That one got good publicity before it too died.
As the owner/founder/author of a bootstrapped SaaS app, I can answer that:
People really, really, REALLY do not want to pay. Really. The dominating perception is that software should be free, or if not free, paid with a one-time purchase in the single-digit dollars. The aversion to paying is huge, you have to provide a "can't live without" feature for people to (grudgingly) pull out their wallets.
Also, if you actually do the numbers as a business owner, it turns out that consumer SaaS apps are difficult to sustain financially. With a small number of customers, there just isn't enough money, and if your customer base grows, complexity and costs step in. My SaaS only has paid business tiers for now, starting at $39/month, because much as I try, I can't see how I can make anything cheaper work. It's easy to underestimate costs if you've never ran a business.
I decided to stick with it, charge subscription fees, grow very slowly and see where it takes me, but that is a hard and slow path. I estimate it will take me another year (for an overall of 3 years) to get to a sustainable income stream.
Had a conversation with a fellow developer today, who charges clients $900/day, who baulked at the idea of paying $50 for Paw when Postman is free.
I recommend to focus on the people who value your work, and are happy to pay for your product.
I sell a product named MDB Viewer on the Mac App Store, and judging from support emails many of my customers need it just to convert a single database; but they are happy to pay, and they like that they own a license. There's no way I could sell this as a SaaS product.
There's a lot of things I won't pay $4.99 for because I'm too lazy to tap through five screens and try to remember my CVV. If I could just press one button and the five bucks get charged and that's the end of it, the instant gratification would be hard to resist.
Asking for money is such an huge entry barrier. Even if it would only cost one cent, it would still stop 99.99% of the users from using it. I was kinda hoping for Bitcoin to fix this. But now it already cost a lot to make a transaction, and you can't instantly verify the payment. Paper money was a huge step, electronic payment was another huge step, lets take the next step!
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency literally solves nothing in the app payment use case.
See eg. Sublime text and VS Code. Thank you, Sublime text for validating and educating the market, we'll take it from there with our better and free offering.
It's already happening. For example, the Microsoft Office365 cloud suite of apps is looking pretty comprehensive.
>Why can't people just build products and ask for money upfront?
They can. Why can't they?
>The startup agenda is either make a billion dollar company or go home.
A certain kind of start-up with a certain kind of investment model. Lots of startups grow to be medium sized business.
I really liked Tomboy, I enjoyed Hackpad, although I quit using it over time- I collaborate much less now.
I don't take notes anymore, with software or on paper.
This sentence made me laugh out loud, sounds like you gave up on life.
The opposing mindset is also valid, of course. Different strokes.
As an aside, there are also so many ways that archiving is automated these days that many things we used to have to manually take note of are automatically and indefinitely searchable.
1104 days ago -- about 3 years and a week. Something makes me think this had been planned for a while.
I think the timing of "3 years plus a week" indicates that they either decided this date 3 years ago and were just biding their time, or that someone signed an agreement to keep it going for 3 years and they're no longer being held to that.
Not sure if all the functionality was kept but really I think one of the better acquisition and eventual closing of a Saas app I've heard of so far.
There's this open source version of Hackpad, under Dropbox's Github account. Apparently, it's an obsolete version, since the last commit made dates back to two years ago.
Not sure whether they would take down this repo too.
We're building Memo, a note-taking app for technical teams. We integrate deeply with Slack which makes it super easy to save notes while in Slack, and you can write notes using both Markdown and Slack formatting (including @users, #channels and :emoji:).
We were recently on Hacker News and Product Hunt and got a ton of great feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14092279
Having been through an acquisition before, our plan is to build a sustainable business asap by charging for the product.
As I learned from a Jeopardy answer the other day, the most patented design in the United States is for a mousetrap. Everybody tries to build a better mousetrap, apparently that cliche is true! Big picture stuff is kind of wonky like that from my studies, and I love it.
I know it talks about Dropbox Paper, but I just find it funny that this "recommendation" works as well with the real , physical paper.
best of luck in the future