Kicksend (YC S11) goes free. Send unlimited files to anyone. | Hacker News Reader

Kicksend (YC S11) goes free. Send unlimited files to anyone.

venturebeat.com

93 pointsbrendanlim56 comments

So what's the business model here now ?

I'm curious about this too. Maybe get as many users as possible and then either get bought or add a different set of premium features.

I agree, isn't this now the "gain users as fast as we can, regardless of cost" model?

My guess is that they would try to become so useful, then try to either:

a) up-sell (something) or

b) get bought by someone who finds them useful or

c) start to threaten Facebook with a new file/photo-sharing network and get bought

It's the "wild goose chase" business model. You tie up a bunch of capable guys/gals with some money and prevent them from working on something that might harm some of your other investments and/or prevent them from getting into the hands of other angels/vc's. If the idea fails you then pivot the team into one of your other investments. If the idea succeeds you make a profit off of that. So in essence tie up the team. Companies have been doing this for years, tying up the best legal minds so their competitors don't get to use them.

After all, YC will invest even if you don't have an idea. So what's the big leap if you have a mediocre idea and they manage to tie you up and then steer you to another idea with a little investment?

This is such a cynical and negative comment. The only purpose it serves is to belittle the founder's motivations, as well as belittling YC's tireless efforts. Ugh, just thinking about such a negative comment has put me in a bad mood :(

I said:

"prevent them from getting into the hands of other angels/vc's."

I'm going to pay you a complement here to get you out of your bad mood.

Your team is a perfect example of what I meant. I went and took a look at clutch.io. It looks beautiful and it's obvious you and your co-founder are very talented and will create something great even if the market for clutch.io isn't that large (I don't know what the market is, I'm just saying "if" it isn't that large). So if you pitched me and said you wanted funding you would be exactly the type of person that I'd want to "tie up". Nothing wrong with that.

But it does look like a great idea. My question as an investor would be "how large of a market is there" but the fact that you have talent means any investment will pay off in the long run.

This is so wrong!

On the other hand, I think this is a wild goose chase in a different way. It is a talented team that is solving a genuine problem. Today for me to share large files I need to use dropbox. The problem with dropbox is that it needs a sync based solution, that counts towards your quota. Agreed, you can share and then delete once received. But something lightweight like kicksend is a breath of fresh air to use.

Anyway, the wild goose chase here might be that there might never be a business model here, but if the team can solve certain problems then they align themselves to be bought over by a 'big one'. Some of the problems that the team could be genuinely solving:

- Ease the sharing process

- Optimal data compression and bandwidht reduction on the server side

- Privacy

etc...

I would not for once think that the team is doing this 'cos someone else wants them to.

Hope they get bought out until they come up with a better idea?

(Not knocking the product, or saying they're doing it wrong; just agreeing it's difficult to immediately see the business model)

"Now that we've got you setup with using your Facebook account, you need to create a password for Kicksend. This allows you to login to our apps with your email address (xxxxx@yyyyy.com) and password."

I think you guys need to drop that password requirement...

More feedback:

1. This is also broken: https://img.skitch.com/20120517-fq5cdhtchw39nrfti2a3qcw8t9.j...

I was trying to type in 123456@myemail.com and the problems are:

  1. I can't see 123 anymore
  2. I can't move cursor at all, cursor keys seem to be ignored.
  3. the last letter is partially obscured.

Using latest Chrome on Lion here.

2. Next, the upload dialog does not have a cancel button and no completion estimate. The upload is slow; my files are large and the uplink is slow, so it's my fault, but there could be better handling of this problem I think.

3. Further, there is no way to send feedback. When I click "feedback" I am presented with a search box for FAQ. I don't think it's time yet to be afraid of too many people sending in suggestions and feedback. It's safe to let people send you email.

4. Finally upload is complete and I received my sharing email, and it has a separate link for each file. This is a show-stopper for me - I am not sitting there and clicking links one by one. How about a simple "get all the stuff as one zip file" link?

It is kind of crazy that in 2012 this isn't already a solved problem for most people. (for me, I just do an scp to a machine with shared unix accounts, which is the 1990s solution (very similar to the unencrypted 1980s solution), and obviously not an option for the 99%.

I'd really like to see this take off, get integrated into various apps, etc.

That totally reminded me of http://xkcd.com/949/.

I wonder how many XKCD comics could become startups, or be mapped to existing startups.

And I wonder how many startups can be mapped to an XKCD comic. :/

The recent dropbox get link feature basically solves this ...

I just use email

Please don't email me 100MB files :)

(Annoyingly, I've been stuck dealing with >2TB and often >4TB files, too)

http://www.42share.com solves it pretty well and doesn't require a download or registration

Services that don't charge hurt the rest of us entrepreneurs.

It sets the expectations that this kind of service should be free the same way the iPhone AppStore has created the perception that $2 is expensive for an app :(

Only if they're unsustainable. If they are sustainable, then that's disruption.

At first glance this looks like a more polished 42share (http://www.42share.com) but forces you to sign up before using. The only about page is linked to in tiny print at the bottom and is just about the members of the team. That might just be because it's in beta, but it will net more users if they can see some kind of description of how it works before having to provide information for nothing in return. Better yet would be to go the 42share route and make signing up optional.

I find it rather amusing that the stated problem is people stalking you through your social media timeline, but then to get started with Kicksend's solution to this problem the only authentication option offered is to use Facebook connect.

How is this different from Google+? I can send my photos to specific people through Google+ and if I don't give anyone else access they will never see it. I can even restrict them from re-sharing the photos with anyone else.

“However, sharing those photos with a subset of your contacts or sending full quality personal images to just your family members is still remarkably difficult. That’s where we come in.”

Hmm, not really. My sister who is not the most technical person has been uploading pictures to PicasaWeb and sharing them with specific people and groups. With the extra storage (whose price sadly increased with Google Drive), I also always upload my files at full resolution and sharing is easy.

The odd thing to me is that if you position yourself against Facebook (who is the implicit target of the first paragraphs), and you go completely free, you have to wonder what the catch is. I pay Google some money for the storage at least.

If you sign up for Google+ dont you get unlimited photo storage on PicasaWeb and can do the same thing + with circles?

"We were living far from our families and needed an easy way to send and receive large batches of original quality photos, videos and other files."

Although many good ideas start this way obviously you have to take into account how many others are in the same situation.

By "original quality" I'm assuming they mean the full, say, 3 to 8mb file not some 60k jpg. While there are certainly people in the printing and graphic design industry (and others) who might need this even keeping in mind that the service is free I don't see a large user base developing. And the relatively small user base won't even be paying for the service.

On the other hand, I never recompress/resize my pictures because it's too much work, and the cameras are geting ever higher resolution.

Maybe, just maybe, they should not require that receiver needs to register also.

"Discretely?" Really?

slipped through the proof readers i supposed..

Yep, each distinct photo is independently sent.

Is it a response to Dropbox, Google Drive, et al? Seems like they're a more elegant way to handle this problem nowadays, but since Kicksend launched well after Dropbox, I'm possibly missing something.

Another startup that doesn't make money. Woo.

This seems easily doable without involving a third party that needs to keep a record of every file sent, the time and the sender and recipient.

But at least this is a step in the right direction.

Now, what if she sends an encrypted file consisting of copyrighted materials? RIAA, MPAA, are you reading along?

What are we going to do to prevent that?

I wonder if this could be done as a desktop app that makes a peer-to-peer connection. The peer-to-peer part makes it so that no one has to spend any money relaying the files (as well as your security/privacy point), and that plus the fact that it's a desktop app means no one has spend any money hosting servers or anything.

The answer is yes. There are multiple (non-VPN) ways to do it, all variations on a common theme. It's been done, multiple times over the past 10 years. But not much effort has gone into making these solutions user friendly and giving them the marketing push of something like this venture.

Obviously if you release somethng like this you run the risk of triggering the usual "illegal file sharing" issues.

But you absolutely do not need cloud storage to move large files. There are other ways to do it.

> But not much effort has gone into making these solutions user friendly and giving them the marketing push of something like this venture.

This is the key thing. The desktop app I'm imaging is user friendly, and probably at least somewhat pretty. I think the main technical issue is probably the fact that most people are NATed by their routers, so peer to peer is tricky, but I think with uPnP, you could get around that.

I was originally thinking of this as an open source app, but I suppose one could go the paid app route.

"I think the main technical issue is probably the fact that most people are NATed."

It's really not much of an issue as long as at least one peer has a reachable IP. I sometimes wonder how many people are under the impression that NAT's are a showstopper. This is simply not true. The showstopper is probably the RIAA and MPAA.

Skype slipped under the radar because they branded themselves as VOIP not file sharing. But it's really no different. It's peer to peer data exchange.

Only if both peers are behind the same NAT does the NAT pose a problem, in which case an external "supernode" is needed. But that's easy to set up. And it does not need access to packet payloads.

You could do a paid app. But the code to accomplish the job is very simple and has been made public in various forms multiple times.

File sharing copyright concerns, monitoring communications to catch bad guys and all that stuff is what's holding this back, not lack of a solution for connecting through NAT's.

> File sharing copyright concerns, monitoring communications to catch bad guys and all that stuff is what's holding this back, not lack of a solution for connecting through NAT's.

Why? It's software transferring files between two parties, just like you can do with email and things like Skype and even AIM, and hell, even the service we're talking about. Is there precedent for the people who write such software having legal problems? I'm aware of cases like rapidshare and torrent sites, but for example, are the authors of bittorrent clients also targeted?

> I sometimes wonder how many people are under the impression that NAT's are a showstopper. This is simply not true.

Hmm, I'll admit I don't fully understand this, but back in my torrenting days, you always had to forward a port to be reachable. How do you get around that?

If you want some interesting precedent, do some research on "Internet2" and the testimony of the RIAA to legislators.

Do you know what a LAN is? It is an evil invention to share copyrighted works. It must be stopped.

If you want a better understanding, read everything you can find on UDP, Ethernet, firewalls, NAT and encapsulation, in that order. I would suggest not to waste time trying to figure out "pre-packaged" peer to peer software solutions (i.e. all the different approaches people have taken, e.g., aeroFS, Kicksend or whatever). They often include far more complexity than you need to accomplish peer to peer. As such, they won't help you much to understand the basics: how connections are made.

You are thinking of http://www.aerofs.com/

Hmm... Aerofs seems like dropbox, but peer-to-peer. Not quite the same as what I was thinking of, but very similar.

Never heard of the site until now, I really like the design and the idea. I can see why this can be useful.

I'm really surprised this company received money from so many VC's.

They're offering photo & video sharing by email ! Seriously ? Is it that hard for someone to login to Flickr or YouTube and click the email icon.

I feel like any 1/2 way decent engineer could make a clone of this company in 8 hrs

I kinda miss the previous design, I thought it was more distinctive:

http://mikekus.com/archive/kicksend-homepage-page-design/

But current one has a ballsy

     letter-spacing: -0.05em;

Okay, now I know why I could't read the text I was typing in. Thank you, fellow hacker huhtenberg.

Just curious, could one use this as a backup solution for your own files? Because it looks like you can if they truly go unlimited

can believe this is a YC company, can not see any value out of it....

Sharing files between people who do it infrequently is still an unsolved problem. How do I send pictures of my kids to their grandparents for example? It is still easier for me to just email photos to them.

Hell, I just got my lab group to start using Dropbox for group sharing...

> Sharing files between people who do it infrequently is still an unsolved problem. How do I send pictures of my kids to their grandparents for example? It is still easier for me to just email photos to them.

That sounds pretty solved to me.

Except when they try to send me every single picture that they took over the holidays en masse. I end up with 10 emails, each with 10 pictures, in such low resolution that they are barely useful for anything other than viewing on screen. I want the full resolution photos online so that I could download the 1 or 2 that I really want to have.

Are there really people who are sophisticated enough to resize images but not sophisticated enough to use a zip file?

And free flickr accounts work well enough for people who don't need to print the photos out (which is really the only case you need full res, right?)

They use the default crapware that came with the camera to send pictures. It auto resizes the photos in the worst possible way. Plus, even zipped, a moderate number of original sizes photos is still larger than a lot of email programs can handle.

I think you're drastically overestimating the sophistication levels of a lot of people when it comes to sharing photos and files. Plus, I doubt my dad has heard of Flickr, let alone know how to spell it.

Your point regarding crapware makes sense, I hadn't thought about that possibility.

And regarding Flickr... You're advocating that you would have your dad use Kicksend, which presumably he won't have heard of either.

What's especially weird to me is that a number of sites like this have existed before, and only were able to sustain themselves by turning a blind eye to piracy and putting wildly intrusive ads and things like countdown timers for downloads all over the place.

This one now seems ready to face the exact same problems.

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