Posthaven Launches In Public Beta | Hacker News Reader

Posthaven Launches In Public Beta

techcrunch.com

106 pointsgarry40 comments

I signed up for an account today. They don't give much away on their homepage, so here's a preview of the current post editor for those interested:

http://d.pr/i/189H

You can sign up today for $5 and you won't be billed again until they're out of beta. I felt it was worth doing because I support their vision and I'm keen to see how it develops, even though the actual product is very bare bones at the moment. (e.g. No template editing, no pages, can't save posts as drafts.)

What they have so far seems fast, clean, and easy to use, though. The environment is refreshing compared to WordPress and more suited to medium-to-longform writing than tumblr.

My advice to the creators: show actual mockups of what you're hoping to build. (e.g. http://john.onolan.org/ghost/ )

Promising never to sell out is great, but I would much rather see a visual pledge in the form of, "This is what we plan to make [screenshots] and this is the order we're building those features." Even if you don't offer a definitive schedule, at least your beta backers will feel more invested in the journey you're on.

Thanks for this feedback and for your support. I really appreciate it. I'll try to incorporate all of this into the site today.

Hey, someone explain to me what happened here... seems like twitter bought Posterous to shut it down, and the founders took the money and basically started the same product with a new name and a pay model.

I left Posterous over a year before the acquisition due to a difference in opinion over strategy. Brett had also left before. I didn't agree with where my cofounder wanted to go with it. I was bummed to see it didn't work out as we had hoped when it was acq-hired. I use Posterous a ton, and I needed a replacement anyway. Thus, Posthaven. I've been working at YC since 2011, actually.

Last year, I started using Posterous, both as blogger and developer.

As a blogger it worked fine.

As a developer it was terribly supported. The API was fine, but the implementations were often terribly flawed. Tags could not be deleted. Posts entered with markup could not be retrieved as markup. It was almost impossible to connect to an engineer at Posterous who cared.

I do hope Posthaven succeeds. I encourage you to have an API. I encourage you to treat your external developers with the respect Posterous was unable to show.

Makes sense. We've been careful to stick to RESTful endpoints so it should be a matter of creating API keys and documenting it properly.

The Posterous API was very RESTful and was my first real exploration into that. I wrote an emacs posterous blogging extension, and it was a very valuable learning experience in REST.

Posthaven has made a promise to users that they won't sell (and given that Garry is behind it, I don't think that's a promise made lightly). It's built for people who are tired of seeing their content eventually become dead links.

Instead of offering it free they have a sustainable business model @ $5/mo, so they won't be beholden to finding a big exit or raising a ton of cash.

Foursquare was started in a similar way. (Google bought and shuttered Dodgeball, founders did their time at Google, then quit and started Foursquare).

Andy Rubin has done this successfully as well (Danger, MSFT, Android).

Yeah, this is a bit of a head-scratcher for me.

That's how I understand it. The founders get acquisition money and get to keep the (slightly different) product and users. How often does a deal like that come along?

No, this is a new codebase from scratch. There's zero IP and zero users from Posterous. It's also not a startup -- we are exploring ways to turn it into a non-profit.

Better, turn it into a co-operative? I'm dying to see more co-operatives in the startup space.

Advice to startups: list your price at its yearly rate, not monthly. I see the words "per month" and I think yet another thing sipping on my bank account every month. It's silly but it's easier to accept that I'm dishing out money for something that I won't have to think about again until a year.

I think you're in the minority, there. People notice the numbers first, and the lower the number the better.

You're probably right.

I'm starting to get that same feeling but for most people paying monthly is much more affordable. Advertising the yearly price more prominently than the monthly one might turn people off.

Yup. I ran https://snipt.net/pro/ for $19/year for a few months and only had a handful of signups. As soon as I went to $3/mo, we started getting signups daily.

Hi Garry (& Posthaven team),

So I've used Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and Posterous before, maybe a few other blogging services. LJ has disintegrated due to $xyz politics, Dreamwidth is pretty awesome but very small, Tumblr is looking for $$$, and Posterous is, well, you know.

So I regret to say that I do not look forward to using Posthaven. I instead plan to write my own content system that is git & markdown driven that renders out to my own site, paid for by me. You see, I do not trust content hosting anymore without significant reason to believe they won't drop me into a hole because $business-reason. Perhaps if Posthaven is still a going concern in 5 years and fully self-owned/IPO'd, then I will consider it a reasonable place to put time into. I guess I've just gotten burnt and my crispyness is starting to show.

I do wish you the best of luck, and I hope that Posthaven is a long-term stable business.

Regards, Paul

I love the concept of Posthaven because it says that a huge exit doesn't have to be the end game for every startup.

They've made a promise to their users to live by a sustainable business model instead of shooting the moon. Writing should be permanent, but the model of startups is one that favors the temporary. This seems like a logical next step.

I've decided that any content I produce in the future will be completely under my control, and in this context I've been very pleased with the Octopress/Jekyll setup I installed for the Rails Tutorial news feed (http://news.railstutorial.org/) once the Posterous shutdown date was announced. That said, I'm really happy that Garry and Brett have made Posthaven, and I'm excited to see them come so far so fast.

Anyone who complains about how they can't trust the Posthaven team because Posterous was shut down has to put $10 into the 'poor reading comprehension' pool.

Is there an option for a paying customer to "suspend" his account? If so, then how long after "suspending" would the customer's content get deleted?

We were thinking if someone pays for a year, we'll just keep the content online forever. Paul Buchheit actually gave us that idea.

I like this idea! But what happens if someone "suspends" their account after 1 month? How long will the content remain online then?

There is no point in asking these questions about a free product. But since this is a paid product, an exhaustive Data Retention Policy will be very helpful, IMO.

If you read their pledge you will find the answer:

"What happens if I stop paying?

Permanent URLs are a powerful idea, and it's a feature of using Posthaven we think you should get even if you stop paying. We'll keep the site online, but you won't be able to edit content or add to it. If you want to renew, start paying again and your account will be restored.

When will something qualify for permanent storage? Let's keep it simple initially: If you pay for a year's worth of service, your content is safe and we'll keep it online."

Just signed up. My thoughts: Looks pretty slick. My hat's off to you guys. I like that you already have custom domains option available, some services charge extra for that (i.e. Wordpress).

I realize you're still in beta, but I'd like to make a feature request: the ability to email posts to my blog and have them autoposted.

I moved my blogs over the Posthaven and I have to say the import worked quite nicely.

Still waiting on custom styling before switching the domains over though. Hope that happens before April 30th. Also hope they do a better job of Markdown than Posterous.

This is really weird.

> Its creators are also inspired by Google Reader’s recent demise

What does a demise of a Google product has to do with another totally different product by a different company?

Google Reader is a social service that was free. Google is a company that makes a lot of money, just not on that thing. The product was added to a "projects to cut" list in an email by a Google executive, and the next day it was axed.

Twitter bought Posterous for the talented team. A year later, the service is axed.

This is why things like Newsblur or Posthaven should exist for certain types of socially valuable purposes -- it's a paid service that won't go away. Because, well, money.

Your argument notwithstanding but there is no proof, or solid precedence, of a paid service surviving just because it is a paid service.

Google did not say (at least not publicly) that they're cutting GR because the service wasn't generating revenue.

I think there should also be a free version, perhaps with restrictions.

Disagree. This is something you should have to pay for, especially given their promise to keep your stuff online forever. Paying makes the business model clear; a free plan starts to muddy the waters and certainly is no benefit to paying users or the company.

There are plenty of places to post for free if you don't care about keeping your stuff around forever. You get what you pay for after all.

So, one of the restrictions could be that my stuff would only be online if there is activity on it, subject to a maximum of say, a year.

I would like to try Posthaven and only if I feel that its worth 5$/month to me, then I can consider upgrading from the free plan to the paid one.

A free plan is beneficial to the company, since it would help in popularizing the app.

I see how having a free demo account might be helpful for trying out the service, but a permanently free account is totally contrary to the idea of posthaven.

Really though, paying $5 to try it out isn't a huge deal if you don't like the service -- you can cancel whenever. I'd rather see development of useful features than the devs worrying about a free demo thing. Because of the way it's structured, a free trial doesn't benefit the company or paying users -- growth is not the goal, sustainability is.

Bottom line: I don't think this is the right place for people unwilling to put $5 toward an awesome idea/business model. You can go use tumblr or blogger or whatever.

But it's not a company; it's a non-profit (or is going to be one). I don't think the goal here is to get big; it's to be self-sustaining, and a free plan doesn't do that.

A free trial version would be useful for people interested in checking it out. I'd rather have it feature limited to the point that it's unsuitable for long term use than have to remember to cancel a "free for one month" trial account.

A nice thing about not having a free plan is you don't have to deal with cheap free users. Someone who's paying you $60/year is invested in the service and wants to see it succeed.

Am I being down-voted because my opinions don't agree with yours?

Awesome Garry!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com