Zimbra has more users than Gmail. And they are paying. | Hacker News Reader

Zimbra has more users than Gmail. And they are paying.

venturebeat.com

28 pointsrokhayakebe37 comments

It's actually pretty astonishing to me how many web sites don't charge anything. It reminds me of how Bill Gates gloats about the early days of MS how there was this huge hobbyist scene in software and very few were getting paid (not sure how accurate that really is but it seems similar to what I see today).

Developers of start ups should get used to the idea that it's OK to charge people for a service you provide. It provides psychological incentives to the buyers that they are buying something and therefore are entitled to a real level of service, and it provides real cash to the founders to properly grow the business.

Not to mention, it is trivially easy to start charging people these days, with services like Amazon FPS.

I really thought back in 2000 that companies based around the 'advertising will pay for everything' model would have learned their lesson, but clearly it's not the case.

There's a lot of hate for ad plays here on HN, and that's fine. (My startup is a commission-based model as well.)

But let's be honest - there are plenty of great, useful apps supported by advertising and lead generation where the end-consumer pays not a penny: Google, Yelp, YouTube, Zillow, SideStep, YellowPages, TicketStumbler, and so forth. And plenty of media sites make money on ads: Ars Technica, Pitchfork Media, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and so on.

Let's not let the quest for ramen profitability distract us from looking long-term.

I don't 'hate' companies that see advertising as their only revenue source, I just question both it's effectiveness in running a sustainable business and the hesitation that software developers working as founders have in charging real money for the quality services they are building.

I don't count media companies, as I'm not sure of any ycombinator start ups focused on media (in the sense of being blogs, such as tech crunch or hpost, etc.), and those list of technology service-oriented companies you list, it's fairly questionable how great any of their business models really were/are.

Everyone likes to point out Google and YouTube, but they forget google owns online advertising, period. And YouTube never really made any money.

Don't get me wrong - it's great being an acquisition target and it's a great way to make some quick cash, but I think generally founders under-estimate the potential of their own company of being self sustaining and being very profitable with a paying customer base.

Agreed, a website with low recurring expenses and high volume of quality traffic can probably survive just on advertising.

The problem with advertising-only models IMHO is that ultimately survival of the company depends on other companies' advertising budgets instead of the value it's products provide to their end users. At the moment that situation does not seem ideal.

"The problem with advertising-only models IMHO is that ultimately survival of the company depends on other companies' advertising budgets instead of the value it's products provide to their end users. At the moment that situation does not seem ideal."

Um, depending on users paying you is equally problematic. I imagine this moment isn't good for that either.

Advertising budgets are down just as much as consumer confidence - they are tightly related. But even in hard times people's needs don't change - save people time, money, or make them healthier, #2 might be more attractive in recessions, but people will always pay for any of those services.

and they will find out about those services via marketing.

Google does not online profit from advertising revenue but also from data mining, when you use their services.

agreed, the great part of making users pay, is that you are profitable from pretty much day one, since you aren't spending an arm and a leg on infrastructure.

There are thousands of websites out there that make their founders millions of dollars every year that noone here has heard of. Why? Because they are a paid service with only a few thousand users.

A little math lesson: 3,000 users, at $99/mo = 3.564 million per year. And since they have a low volume of users, they aren't spending a lot of money on servers etc.

By comparison for a free service to reach 3.5 mil profit per year, they'd need to have 3 million users.

The great part about internet, is that there are millions of people using it. And a large portion of these users have never heard of all the free solutions we all know about since we read HN.

Another point to this: people who run these sorts of low user, high margin companies will never reveal it to the hacker news/tech crunch/etc. crowd - for the simple reason that it will seem like it's way too easy how they are making money and it would only invite competitors.

I'm not saying it's impossible to be extremely successful on the ad model, and there are certainly plenty of successes within Y Combinator itself which have been acquired based on free services - the only take away I want people to make from my posts is that you should consider charging people for your service because if it's good enough service and you do it with high quality, there really is no reason for you not to get paid.

Where is the actual source of this information? The Zimbra front page says 20M mailboxes (does not say how many are paid or not). There's no press release or RSS entry.

The last number I see approved in some way by Zimbra is a 20M paid mailboxes article from January on http://www.zimbra.com/about/news.html

What, they gained 20 million new paying customers in the last six weeks (with no big, new deal with another mail provider)?

And where is that chart from in the venturebeat article? There are no sources for anything listed.

I don't find this information credible.

And there's a new CNET entry that says 40M but... it references the venturebeat link as its source not any actual Zimbra statement.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10190071-16.html

EDIT:

The author of that says: "I talked with the company. They just haven't released the formal PR yet"

I guess we will see later. Interested to know what the number actually means and how on Earth that amount of recent growth could be possible.

Facebook is adding 700k+ users a day. But they aren't facebook.

And those users aren't paying anything.

I use Zimbra at work (though we use the open-source version and don't pay a dime), and Gmail for personal use. They both have strengths and weaknesses, but I see Zimbra as the better professional solution. The search in Gmail is great, but no amount of tags can replace good old fashioned folders in Zimbra - especially if you subscribe to a bunch of FOSS project mailing lists - I just don't need to read it all that often but when I do I want it in one place. The calendaring system in Zimbra is useful for scheduling meetings as well.

Strange -- when I've had to use Zimbra in the past, I've found it to be a very painful and frustrating experience. In comparison, GMail is an utter joy.

But you can use Gmail tags exactly like folders, if that's what you want.

labels

You can also use Gmail labels exactly like tags, if that's what you want. ;-)

Can you explain why you can't get all your FOSS project emails "in one place" with labels? Can't you just create a filter in Gmail to tag them as "FOSS" and then auto archive them?

I am not really surprised at this. If you ask for money with a good product, people often pay. A fact that seemed to be lost on many in the tech community in the last few years.

The fact that Yahoo bought it probably helped gained more customers. They can push it to their existing corporate customers.

The problem is one of economics. As Varian and Shapiro say in this book:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a...

"Information commodities trend towards the marginal cost: zero, meaning that selling information commodities is not likely to be successful in the long run."

I think the second word is the issue: commodity implies stagnation. If you have innovation, there is always a moving target, and thus the ability to charge.

Making replicas isn't a good business model. Creating something new and capitalising on it is.

bad headline since it is only talking about paying users.

No, it's not.

It's unclear to me since it says Gmail gets 31.2M and Google Apps (which includes email) has another 10M. Also, I think the article may be wrong, it seems like Zimbra is only claiming 20M. Also note ajkirwin's point above, the measurements also seem to be conflated.

I hate the blending of terms in this article. It makes for a shitty read. Here's an example:

"Zimbra actually has 31.4 million users in the United States, squeaking by the 31.2 million unique monthly visitors Gmail received in the US during the month of January."

Take note. In the first, they put out 31.4 million, but that's a total user count and in the second, they put out 31.2 million, but that's unique monthly visitors.

Two totally different statistics, but they act as if they are the same. GMail likely has a LOT more user accounts, plus, this doesn't account for people who get their email through SMTP/POP or IMAP..

Shame on you VentureBeat. Shame on you.

That's a good point. But where is the 40M figure even coming from or what possible event could have added 20 million new paying customers in the last six weeks (see my 20M comment).

EDIT: CNET employee says he confirmed with Zimbra.

I think they had a deal with Comcast.

But that was in 2007.

I don't understand why magazines like VentureBeat and Wired love to talk up individual companies so much. All the damn time it sounds like this company is so incredibly amazing and all the time the numbers are inflated and skewed as much as they can possibly get away with. Is the honest truth not interesting enough?

They're getting paid by them, right?

They probably arent getting paid- there is just nothing too interesting going on in the startup world right now that they have to make trivial things into incredible stories.

Sure, but aren't there other things to write about, besides how incredibly magnificent some individual company is doing (with the help of skewed stats, at that)? It seems like these "journalists" aren't working from a wealth of ideas and perspectives.

"Throw in the fact that we’re measuring Zimbra’s self-reported numbers against numbers from comScore and Google, and things start looking pretty dodgy."

This seems to be another trend. Throw out a bunch of numbers that sound good but don't really allow any sort of comparison and then cover yourself with a throw-away sentence at the end of the article.

I used Zimbra for the first time, when I became Stanford student. When I logged in to my Stanford University email, I found out it's Zimbra...

Zimbra is really great product, and yeah... more than 40 MM are using it; What is the problem with that?

I never saw zimbra in any internet cafe in India or Nepal. It's all about facebook, (five screens of ten) gmail, and some hotmail (mostly japanese).

Seems like they are living in their own reallity.

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