randoman

This is so awesome, thank you. Can't wait to play around with it

Snap's ARPU is about $1 per quarter. Surely the core demo can afford even a 100% markup on that?

My problem with any ad model is it incentivises the maximisation of views/engagement that allow for more/stickier ad impressions which means a proliferation of viral/tabloid/divisive content like youtube/snap/facebook. Once that incentive can be minimised, the incentive to provide quality product that users then feel willing to pay for can become more important.

Of course, these networks didn't attract the user numbers they have by charging up front so for any challenger to come along and try this model will be extremely difficult due to the aforementioned friction in either getting out your credit card to pay or paying up front for an app. People will gladly shell out hundreds of dollars for a new phone but won't shell out a fraction of that for a quality app on that phone.

We wanted to focus on natively using Terraform and whilst kops can output Terraform and we've used kops in a couple of clusters, we didn't see the kops -> terraform output as a necessary step at this stage.

Having said that, it's a very fast moving environment and kops is an excellent project so we will likely do something in that space too.

I really enjoyed reading about your company on Idealog (https://idealog.co.nz/technologymonth/2017/08/meet-thematic-...). It was especially great to see how you bootstrapped and found product-market fit rather than just raising a bunch of cash for an idea that may or may not be applicable in the real world. Congratulations on the launch and your success with YC. Go Kiwis!