Notes on Mixergy interview with TwitPic founder Noah Everett | Hacker News Reader

Notes on Mixergy interview with TwitPic founder Noah Everett

mixergynotes.com

28 pointsmixergyNOTES48 comments

I may be mistaken but no where in this article does it say that Noah Everett makes $5million a year. It does say "revenue projections: $3-4 million" and "#1 – have a company worth 8 figures by 24, #2 – have a company generating 7 figures/year in revenue by 25"

No you're correct, just a typical Mixergy puff-piece line.

Mixergynotes is not associated with Mixergy.

We know that Twitter makes money off the search deals with Google and Bing, and it's a lot more than $5 million.

And it could disappear in a second.

idk. Big money deals with a single or maybe 2 customers is insanely high risk.

How do we know how much they make from their deals? How do you know it's more than $5m?

> And it could disappear in a second.

How so? I'm guessing they have contracts, and MSFT and GOOG aren't the type to renege on their signed deals.

I just mean that they could both decide to cancel the contracts when not beneficial for them to do so any more.

Say buzz takes off (don't laugh).

I'd just rather have millions of paying customers (advertising) than 2 customers.

Yes, and Twitter could start hosting images. Nothing is safe and eternal.

Most people don't use Twitter.com they use 3rd party clients, so twitters control is limited.

Yeah, they're just selling different levels of access to their data stream. Besides the firehose, they have streams of things like all links and retweets, which require some kind of partnership.

It's about $25 Million a year.

Of course the other factor:

  Twitter: funding $160m, you say rev $25m
  Twitpic: funding $0, rev $5m

So I think twitpic comes out pretty fantastically well.

That's daft. Funding isn't a liability (in the financial sense), and those numbers don't say anything about growth prospects.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter grow their revenue. The number of customers who will pay $m's to do a deal seems reasonably small.

Fantastic point.

In terms of scaling, how much larger is twitter than twitpic? $160 Million larger?

For me, the most amazing thing is the "time to hockey stick": Friday night he starts hacking, and by Monday it's getting blogged about and going viral. That is an amazingly short amount of time to build something people want. Most of us have to iterate a long time to achieve that.

That's in the short term of course. Twitpic is essentially a feature on top of Twitter and without Twitter, Twitpic wouldn't exist. In the end, if Twitter implemented picture hosting themselves, Twitpic would surely slowly die.

That is one way to look at it but the headline says. 'Twitter makes nothing.' So the comment is about setting the record straight, not comparing business models.

I still dont know what to make of these deals. On the one hand: Twitter brought in good revenue. This is smart and shows the value in their data.

On the other hand: I personally feel Twitter's real value to an acquirer like MSFT or GOOG is the data. The rest of it is kind of gravy and it's only there to provide the data (ie- you need people posting things in order to have the search data). In short, GOOG basically got the value they needed out of Twitter for a measly 25 million dollars. Why would they ever acquire them at what's sure to be a number at least 40x that amount?... Except to make sure someone else doesn't hence cutting off their access to the data.

revenue took off when they moved from Adsense to other ad promoters

For those of you struggling with adsense, take note.

When is a good time to switch, and where to? Does it make sense for smaller sites, too?

So, my 2 cents: First, sign up with as many ad networks as you can. Then, note the CPMs that you are getting with each ad network. Finally, chain the ad tags together using minimums and redirects. For example, say you've tried 5 ad networks: A, B, C, D, and AdSense. Put ad tags from A on your site, and redirect to B if A goes below a certain minimum. Then redirect to C if B goes below another lower minimum. Keep redirecting until you get to AdSense, the internet's remnant provider.

Every once in a while, check in and make sure that your redirects and minimums are making sense. If you do this, then you'll be capturing a pretty high CPM. To my knowledge, almost all networks support this structure, except for AdSense, which doesn't redirect and therefor goes at the end of the chain.

Yeah that part was very interesting. We all know adsense revenue is a sort of lower end mark of what is achievable, but it's not always obvious what other ad promoters to try.

Any good ad networks people recommend?

The best ad network is no ad network, if you have enough aggregate demand to warrant it.

eg Employing your own ad sales staff to manage campaigns, and thus cut out the 30% or so that ad networks take?

It's not just about the cut. You can sell inventory for more than the ad networks sell it (their business is about volume and teeth whitening ads).

All of the financial data is neat, but am I the only one surprised by the line:

- Moved to South Carolina because of The Patriot, the warm weather, and the beach

The Patriot?! I liked "Braveheart goes to America" as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure I'd up and move to SC because of it. An answer that bizarre deserves a followup.

An answer that bizarre deserves a followup.

It's not that bizarre. I moved to San Francisco because of all the skateboarding videos I watched when I was 13.

I'd bet that 90% of the people who move to NYC move here because of an idea of the city that is based on movies or tv shows.

Ok, but SF and NY are world capitals, tech/biz hubs. Skateboarding was part of the cultural zeitgeist for decades. The Patriot was a big budget "B" movie that featured the carnage of a bunch of innocents. I actually like the movie as a guilty pleasure. To put it another way, I wouldn't move to Minnesota because of Wayne's World.

Wayne's World was somewhere in Illinois. I would totally move to Minnesota if it was really like Purple Rain. (It's not - it's more like Mall Rats)

Wayne's World was set (not filmed) in Aurora, IL, where I now live. (I did not move here out of Wayne's World nostalgia).

I live in Charleston and have met Noah a few times (nice guy, incidentally). If you come visit, you will see why someone would want to live here pretty quickly.

I meant no disrespect to SC. I've actually heard Charleston is a nice example of "New Urbanist" housing development and the southern charm and warm weather is hard to beat.

I just thought it was really funny that he cited the Patriot movie as a reason to move there. I like a lot of silly movies, but never thought to relocate because of them!

I think you are looking too much into this.

It's likely he was intrigued by the place because of the movie, checked it out, liked it and decided to move.

I'm sure he didn't head for the airport when the credits rolled.

The people I met in SC were pretty decent folks...

re: Patriot, IMHO the most coherent, put-together film Mel Gibson ever did.

I wish this site linked back to the original Mixergy videos from the notes, both for ethical and practical reasons.

Twitter makes about $25M yearly from search deals, and has a more sustainable business than TwitPic.

When can we kill the meme that twitter and facebook are not making money or are not profitable?

When they go public and we can see the balance sheets and not just press releases.

In the context of an interview with a tiny private company built on a clearly much bigger private company, I don't think your comment makes much sense.

It was a direct answer to your question which was explicitly about fb + twitter. What's not to get?

It was not at all a direct answer to the title of the original post, which implied twitter makes no money. It also doesn't make much sense, considering there are an inordinate number of profitable private companies.

This is my first time seeing MixergyNOTES, and I must say I really enjoy this concise cliffsnotes version of the interview. I was able to take in all the key points within 5 minutes' time.

Thank You!

The guy turned down a minimum of $10,000,000. Is he stupid? (I should add, I would take that deal, because if twitter add in any kind of image service or some other service gets popular...)

Whether turning down $10M was a bad idea depends on a number of factors, from expected revenues to his own life goals. $10M would certainly provide for a lot of freedom. The 800lb gorilla is Twitter, and if/when they start to cannibalize the third parties in an effort to build their own revenues. Twitter certainly isn't at that point yet, but it will happen eventually.

Total investment into Twitpic was $5,000

Does this mean that Noah Everett's total investment as of now is $5000, or that at one point in time (possibly before he"rebuilt the site from the ground up to run on a scalable platform") his total investment was $5000?

The past tense on "was" makes it hard to tell which it is; it would be even more interesting of a story if the answer is the former.

I think it means his out of pocket investment to bootstrap the company.

in the interview he says around 1.5 mio in 2009

a quick look at quantcast shows that US traffic (which is by far the most monetizable) hasn't grown at all since july 09 (though there is a nice bump in intl. traffic) http://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com

so i would say 2-3 mio is a more reasonable assumption than 5 mio. which is still fantastic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com