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Comment by badclient | Hacker News Reader

Have app.net people clarified if they would be okay if the service only had 10,000 users at its stabilization point?

I know you'd be okay with it but so far, we don't have much from them stating the same. The default of course is that a service that peeks at 10,000 users is headed to dead pool. This is a bit different with 10K paid users but that is still not much in terms of providing financial security to the company to not require funding or other creative ways to monetize.

So my question is simple to app.net folks: if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?

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I'm actually okay with twitter only having 12 users (plus me) - just as long as they are the correct 12 users. So far, 5 of the 12 have committed to using App.net.

I'm a relic though - I make a lot of use of skype-chat/AIM/SMS/iMessaging for my DMing - very little goes through @messages on twitter. For those who do all their messaging on twitter, broad uptake might be more important.

I'm hoping that App.Net establishes an equilibrium somewhat similar to to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL - in which a dedicated paying community of 5,000 to 10,000 is more than enough for viability - particularly as I think this 5-10K users will be among the most interesting on the internet, and will almost certainly avoid the "September Problem."

Regardless - it's something new, with a working Alpha, with an API, and an interesting group of people, lead by someone with a track record of Getting Things Done. The next year, at the very least will be interesting.

> if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?

This is entirely dependent on opportunity cost--ie, whats their take-home pay, and whats the real commitment?

I'd they are just in it for the ideology, then I fully expect then to run the company as a non profit. Oh, they aren't are they? They want to make money too? And they're trying to convince people that they're in it for openness and all that? If they made App.net into a Wikipedia style foundation, I would have gladly jumped on board. But instead they're just trying to create an angle to justify a twitter clone. I can build my own twitter clone. I don't need to pay App.net for that. I have yet to see anything original about this idea. They're just trying to profit on a rather limited crowd of tech people. If it was such a great idea, then the VCs would be throwing money at them. And no, they didn't turn it down-- it isn't there because their business model won't scale. There's only a limited amount of social network inbreeding that can happen before a niche paid network runs out of cousins.

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