Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know that calling out Kevin Rose personally is fair, but I do know (and have mentioned on Hacker News several times in the past) that I'm far less likely to invest any time using the products of startups because I've been burned multiple times by a service that I came to enjoy using disappearing nearly overnight.

This isn't just a problem for startups (though for practical financial reasons it tends to occur on a bigger scale there), it is basically a huge problem for the entire web app ecosystem in general. In the desktop-centric past there were apps I used that were killed off but I continued using for years afterward because the existing code didn't suddenly stop working when it wasn't being supported anymore. The web gives you no safety net here, once the app is killed the servers are likely to be brought offline within a matter of days/weeks and then you're usually SOL.

Feels bad man.

If you can't meaningfully export your data from the service (such that you can reuse it in a different context) then treat the service as disposable. This is true whether startup or not but is especially true for startups. For similar reasons be wary about subscriptions. All startup founders, all of them, are get rich quick fantasists, some are justified in this, most are not, don't entrust them with anything important.

> then treat the service as disposable.

This has implications for pricing.

Would you feel more confident that the app is going to be around in the long haul if they charged you money for using it?

See my other comment about charging users money too.

Charging money just by itself isn't enough to boost my confidence, charging money and reaching a publicly obvious critical mass of users combined would help but then you've still got a chicken and egg problem in creating that critical mass.

Good point. I think it helps to learn more about the people behind the app and their motivations.

I made Handpick (http://handpick.me) as a side project and have not taken any outside investment. Hence I have no investor pressure to obtain a critical mass of users in an insane period of time.

Speaking of app longevity: Recently, I had someone email me saying that they were including some shareware I wrote in the mid-90s in a collection of software that they were going to be bundling with a Mac 680x0 emulator. Look at all the ancient games from the 80s that are still around in emulators and what not.

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