Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

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I first put up Mibbit here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83660

It's growing pretty well now, handles around 10,000,000 messages a day. As you can see from the original post, I started out having a telnet app, irc app, and game app (Multiplayer jigsaws!). The biggest decision I made was to focus on one. I chose IRC for obvious reasons. The feedback I got was that people didn't really know what it was etc - hence the decision to focus on one app.

To be honest I was pretty gutted about the feedback, and was about to give up on it. I then decided to post it to reddit anyway (nothing to loose) a little later, and got a few people using it there. I then found ircatwork.com which I bought pretty cheaply giving me some users to start with. I naively thought I suppose, that posting to hacker news and reddit would lead to users. It didn't. Sure, a little spike in users that lasts a day or so, but it's not long term.

The biggest obstacle so far is probably getting to a state where you can make money. Premium accounts, targeted ads etc all take time.

Also in my case, dealing with IRC networks has been an eye opener. Quite a lot of the older networks are completely opposed to anything like Mibbit... "But then anyone could connect!" they say. Most are friendly now though, and at peak times we have 350 or so connections to freenode, and about 2,500 IRC connections open in all.

It's growing well, but that means it's costing a little more to run, and not yet making money. But I'm sure it'll sort itself out :/

I think the main thing is to grow and get user feedback, and that seems to be happening ok.

I think I'm one of the most critical critics of most of the startups here, but I love mibbit. When I'm stuck in my C++ work, I click my mibbit button, it auto connects me to the channel and I ask the question. And intelligent informed answers come immediately. That's the real value of mibbit - not the IRC per se, but the ability to use it to instantly get a reply to a specific problem. Consider that in your plans for expansion.

Thanks for the feedback. That has been the driving force so far, to keep things dead simple, and just have the rich feature set there if people want to delve further.

My own usage is mainly to go ask questions etc - one of the great strengths of IRC is getting help, so any features that help people get there are always on my mind - integrated pastebin etc...

Feel free to mail me if you have any ideas/gripes.

It's a great app and I use it primarily to access IRC networks outside the corporate firewall. Trying to remember where I first heard of it and I believe it was Hacker News (recommended in a comment).

To be honest, though, I would probably stick with irssi or Colloquy if it wasn't for the firewall limitations at work. I think it'll be difficult to compete with the responsiveness of a native client app, but maybe people like me who run into firewall restrictions or people who can't install software on their work computer will be the types of people you could market freemium accounts to; essentially, tech savvy business users. And if its techies you're after, I imagine you will have a tough time making money off of ads; most of us just don't even look at them (however, give a look to how Pandora serves up ads). So freemium may be the way to go here. For paid accounts, you might also consider offering a searchable and downloadable transcript log (IRC clients offer this already, but I'm sure you could differentiate by making these logs more accessible).

I'm curious as to what others think about this.

Bear in mind that half of the users are using the widget - embedded in someones website - so these users aren't quite as tech savvy.

I think the most likely outcome will be premium accounts for techies, with extra features - scripting, etc, and advertising supported for other users. Also a premium widget for websites that don't want the ads...

Lots of options open.

I use mibbit as my irc client now. Great service.

Have you thought about charging money for an account that can handle irc File transfers? Like allow dcc file transfers to your server, then I can log in and pick up all of the files I have dl'ed from anywhere

Might be some legal implications wrt illegal file sharing though.

I didn't see it the first time around. Pretty neat. I like the built-in paste bin. I probably won't be leaving XChat behind immediately, but there's certainly value in having IRC always available from anywhere.

> having IRC always available from anywhere.

I use it as a way to direct people to #hecl from the home page of http://hecl.org. I suspect there might be other ways to use it as a sort of cheap support system, especially if it were possible to pay some money and get branded versions... stuff like that.

Why haven't you tried putting any ads on it like AdSense? I'm not sure if you'll make decent money that way since most of your users are probably technical oriented, but it's worth a try. If you get enough pageviews, you can also try applying to a CPM network like ValueClick where you get paid based on pageviews.

It actually has advertising which is now also matched to the chat.

Go in a channel and talk about apple or iphones etc, and the infobar above the chat will likely change to show an advert about apple.

The challenge at the moment is getting enough volume of adverts and keeping them current. I may end up dealing directly with advertiser like stumbleupon for instance do.

Awesome app. This is the best web based IRC client that I've seen so far.

Mibbit has become my de-facto IRC app now. Does it support XDCC, etc.?

hey, mibbit rocks! I was just using it tonight, and earlier today.

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