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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a little .----- and more than a little hyperbolic to suggest that Posterous wasn't a business, but rather just an exhibit for the team's portfolio.

The fact is, Posterous tried and lost. By all accounts, valiantly.

I find myself nodding when Maciej writes "Don't Be A Free User", because he is competing with free (and also because I want him to give me a tour of his vault of golden coins). Pointing out that your pricing scheme makes you a sustainable competitive alternative is fair.

But to the best of my knowledge, you aren't competing with Posterous. Why do you feel the need to rub this in?

I sincerely apologize if I'm just missing some parodic element of this post.

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There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. I apologise if it comes across that way.

I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.

FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood.

The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan.

So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.

> There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended by the post, and I apologise if it comes across that way.

> I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.

That sounds like (and certainly comes across far more strongly in the blog post as) a criticism. It sounds fairer the way it was put here than how you said it there. Not having a monetization strategy that involves charging customers is not coextensive with being a mere portfolio exhibit.

Well, I tried to write it in two sections, one for each point. If I failed, I apologise. maybe it’s just like launching a startup, you get some things right, you get other things wrong.

Consider striking the "exhibit for the portfolio" bit.

Try the current flavour and see if it’s still as bitter.

Way better!

I'm still getting upmodded for this but 'raganwald graciously fixed my concern with the article; if I could edit the comment, I would. 'raganwald is a stand-up guy.

Out of curiosity - why are you adding an apostrophe before raganwald's name? I assume it's some convention I'm not familiar with?

I'm quoting names so they aren't evaluated as English, because people here have names like 'the.

It's just a goofy thing I do.

Fair enough :)

Posterous took investment not only from venture capital, but also from users who believed and trusted that the service would find a way to make money and stick around. It hasn't repaid that investment. This feels like a turning point to me as I have no incentive to start investing as a user with the next hot startup that comes along.

You were deluding yourself that you ever had that incentive to "invest" your time with free-to-use startups. Or, more likely, you used the service because it was awesome at the time, better than the alternatives, and didn't think about the downside risk.

There are people out there trying to compete with free and building slow, deliberate, organic growth on the model. So it's hard for me to feel sorry for the users who feel burned when "free" doesn't work out.

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