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Subscriber Only: A Technical Post Mortem

0x1.pt

43 pointsvmsp19 comments

My wife had a startup (B2B) which in the beginning had no traction. It took some years until big companies could be sold too, that had said "go away" just two years earlier. She successfully sold her startup after some years.

The last invoice she (she was Head of Sales) sent out was 10000x the amount of the first invoice.

3 months seems very short. But this is the reason why innovation fails in large companies. They start a project, after 12 months it only has sales of $100k, the company makes $1B, so the project makes no dent. The second year this happens the project gets killed. They forget they need to stick with innovative products for years to make it work, just like startups.

This is part of the Overnight-Success-Fallacy.

There's a lot of truth in this, but at the same time not every product/service/feature is going to make it, and it's much easier and cheaper to fail early rather than fail after many years. Also sometimes what might be a success in the hands of one person won't be in the hands of another due to their skills.

Separating things that are going to fail and those that might make it is the whole problem, and it's not something to be underestimated.

What’s sad is when things don’t fail, they just perform adequately and so get the ax. If it cost the company $500k to make $600k, that’s a decent small business, but for a large multinational that is a rounding error and the people may be redeployed in search of some C level’s bonus.

There's also opportunity cost. When all that people were involved in making 100K, they could have been working hard to make the company 10 million.

Both sides are not wrong, and thank God big companies operate this way otherwise small guys would never have any chance. It's already bad as it is.

There is a spectrum, but anecdotally I would say most people spend far too much time as a "high-effort/low-opportunity" end than the reverse.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

"First, there’s a Jekyll plugin that hooks into the site’s build step... Second, there’s an “agent” script that gets added to the post’s <head>..." And then there has to be a whole payment system to handle the subscriptions, which is apparently separate.

This requires support and hand-holding to get it to work. It's nice to be able to host your own paid-subscription blog, but it's inherently complicated to get that to work. It's so much easier to sign up for some service that does the whole job. Especially just for a blog.

This is also why most "federated" systems don't get traction. Per-user, it's so much more work than a centralized system.

There is a middle ground of self hosted solutions that get the job done with less hassle.

For example, Ghost has payment systems integrations. I'd imagine there's a docker container ready to go for deployment.

Three months is nothing and marketing and getting traction is hard.

Exactly.

I have been working on https://guideamigo.com as a side-project and only in the last month, I'm seeing some traction.

This is pretty cool. But i guess the market is too small. Maybe if handled the payments and it has support for more than just jekyll.

Is anyone using Jekyll these days?

It’s used by GitHub Pages.

https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

Jekyll is my default to quickly throw out something. I also run my personal blog, https://brajeshwar.com with Jekyll.

Been using it for years at https://www.bfoliver.com

Not really had a reason to switch.

Yes, me, for my blog at blog.kortlepel.com :) i found it easy to set up and pleasant to use

I recently searched to do a blog and used Jekyll, what else would you use?

https://gohugo.io/ is what I've used. I find it easier in some ways then Jekyll, but both have advantages.

I use SvelteKit + MDsveX

I used it until I moved to Mataroa. Will use if I still had time.

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