Lanyrd: the early days - honest story of our startup's launch | Hacker News Reader

Lanyrd: the early days - honest story of our startup's launch

lanyrd.com

105 pointssimonw14 comments

I have a lot of respect for the people at Lanyrd for one simple reason - I was going to signup for them but realised that they only supported Twitter authentication in the early days. They were asking for permission to do all kinds of things to my stream, which as I understood it later to be the only option at the time. I tweeted about it, they replied and said "sorry about that" then a few months went by. Out of the blue I get a tweet - hey we no longer require Twitter authentication! I couldn't believe it - really great case of tracking down sources of early negative feedback long after I'd forgotten about the issue and reminding me that they were still there, and still improving. Fantastic.

Thanks very much. That issue was a pretty tough one for us - we ended up investing quite a bit of work in fixing it so we could ask for read-only permissions when people first sign in and then ask them to upgrade to write permissions only if they attempted to do something that required them (like clicking "follow" on another user): http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/twitter-read-only/

It was worth fixing though - only a small number of people really cared, but they were the kind of discerning user that we wanted to reach. Plus it was clearly the right thing to do.

It definitely is the right thing to do. I applaud you guys for going out of your way to make it right.

I'm really surprised developers at Twitter and Facebook haven't made read-only permissions the default.

This is our story compiled from tweets and photos over the period of a month, we launched Lanyrd after a week of development and it took off pretty fast. This storify tries to capture those moments.

I love Lanyrd. You have gone and built something that is better than what came before you. I conceived a startup in in 2006 called Confabb.com that strove to be what Lanyrd has become. Great work!

Thanks Cam. I think the big difference between now and 2006 is that there are existing social graphs to integrate with. Confabb had to build one from scratch, which is hard to get people to do when it's just for conference-related stuff. We've benefitted enormously from using the Twitter graph.

This is a great format to display it in as it's so honest, you've embedded all of the first hand sources instead of writing out a polished story of how you were formed and your story thus far.

Thanks :) that was the idea; I wanted people to get an impression of how it actually felt to be there at the time.

Agreed, it gave a great sense from a small idea for a web app to an actual startup. Fantastic format and excellent article!

Does revenue from affiliate book sales actually cover your costs?

Not in the slightest. We added that feature when we thought Lanyrd would be a side-project that we'd use to keep us amused while we were travelling on honeymoon. We've since raised a large seed round which is covering our costs for the moment!

What's the revenue model? Can you get affiliate commission from the conferences if people purchase tickets?

Very inspirational, best of luck to you.

really enjoyed this read.

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