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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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