Our motivation for Pixter | Hacker News Reader

Our motivation for Pixter

blog.metarain.com

18 pointsfaizanaziz35 comments

> We are exited to launch our latest app - Pixter.

The first sentence had some strange effect on my brain. It's just a small typo but given the context my brain had some problems parsing it.

Thanks for that…

'break;'

Really hope this goes somewhere for the developers, I much prefer the paid model (I pay for Fastmail for example) and would certainly consider paying for a really good app/service. As someone else mentioned, they would do well to at least confirm the existence of other platforms (like Android) and any plans they may (or may not) have. However going iOS first they do stand a good chance of getting Gruber, Dalrymple, Marco etc posting about it as they love those iOS exclusives these days ("iOS is superior because we get apps like this" type posts). I don't blame them going iOS first, but ignoring everything else is definitely a bad idea. Good luck anyway, if you get an Android app will be sure to try it.

Thanks so much. We need support from users like you and that's what matters.

We understand the need to come to other platforms, at the moment it is tough because of limited time. We have worked really hard over the past 3 months to come to this. There are only two of us, one designer and one coder.

No I totally get it, if I was doing an app which ultimately would be multi-platform, it would be foolish not to consider going iOS first despite any personal preference. You've done a great job, just wish I could support it.

It looks good (somewhat like the better parts of Google+) and I like that you're looking at other ways of monetising it than advertising.

Personally I'd be more likely to pay a one-off fee for a mobile app than a subscription, but that might be due to my low usage of them. I hope it works out for you :)

Im really glad that you liked the design, it inspires me to do more. Pixter is a full service and the iOS app is just a part of it. We have a lot of features planned, and we are just getting started. We need support from people like you!

PS: we have a free account, which allows you to follow as many people as you want. It's like a read-only mode, writes are limited to 12 photos a year :) Every sign up helps!

The copy on pixter.in is saturated in negativity. Your demo is all the way at the bottom, while you use the top of the page to bash the incumbent market leader and say how much better yours is.

I don't think that's a good way to sell a product.

Thanks for your advice… Our logic was that since most people know about photo sharing we need to tell them how our product is different. Then we can say what other features we have.

We will look into it

I wish you the best :)

I'm impressed it was built by two dudes in such a short timeframe. I've been working on my webapp for almost an entire year.

Congrats Faizan. Wonderful to see this come out of India, a soft target for free services.

Keep at it guys. The first few months of running a paid service is crucial, once you hit critical mass, there's gonna be no looking back.

Thanks so much Ameen. We are in it for the long haul, lets hope for the best. Thank you so much for your advice and support.

Sad to see that the awesome features are not directly related to the awesomeness of the product, but totally focused on some terms of services about property and privacy...

Can you please explain?

My rights as a paying user should be one (and it is a very nice one I admit) among other features that make the user experience of pixter awesome. Instead, I land on pixter.in and I see 6 bullet points all focused on this one feature, as if Pixter had nothing else to offer.

Oh ok… Thanks for that… The rest of the page talk about the features of the app, but I see your point… Will definitely look into it and change it.

Can I download my photos after I take them? If no third-party can sublicense the photos, does that mean that third-party websites / apps cannot display the photos inline?

Yes, we provide an option to export all your photos. Its in the settings of the app.

Third parties that want to display your pictures can only do so for pictures that are shared publicly(more private options coming soon). They have basic caching options, but cannot store the image, and most importantly cannot use them out of context.

So this is like the bastard son of App.net and Instagram?

We wanted use instagram but with App.net's TOS/Privacy and general interest towards users.

I would say inspired by both of them

Every time you see a big, free, ad-supported or VC funded startup with millions of users, just know that there is probably a place for a paid application that is basically the same app only charging money.

Even for social networks and things, people will gladly pay money for value you provide.

The problem is that it's not the kind of thing that VC's will get as excited about, because unless you can grow into many millions of dollars of revenue fast, it's probably not an interesting way to turn over their money.

So, GMail, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, even something like Groupon could exist as a successful paid app with a one time or recurring revenue stream.

Agreed. Thats why approaching VC's does not make sense for us and we need support from our users.

Sorry to be offtopic but I'm beginning to get annoyed of all the stories that have a title that give you no indication of what the story is about.

For example the top story "Glass". Am I supposed to automatically know what that is about? Same with this story. I click on the title and it's basically an announcement for a new service named "Pixter". Why not put this in the title.

Is Hacker News a site exclusive to Silicon Valley insiders? I live far, far away from Silicon valley. Am I supposed to infer the topic of the article by looking at the title and go "Ah yes, that's the talk of the town you know. Glass and Pixter".

This is not an announcement for pixter. We did that sometime back. This article is about difference between free vs paid services and why we chose to build pixter. We do have an introduction paragraph about pixter without which the article would not make sense to people who don't know what pixter is. Sorry about that, it was not our intention.

To make it clear I have added Pixter to the title

Thanks! That's a lot clearer.

(PS: Despite my criticism, HN is by far the best tech news site around. To everyone involved: Keep it up!)

I just read the article and I couldn't see more than a mention in passing of App.net and Twitter. Certainly nothing about one vs the other.

App.net is a paid service. Twitter is a free service supported by ads. The whole premise of the article is that "Pixter is an ad-free photo sharing social network". Thats how we equate it.

We finish the article by "Over the last year, paid services like App.net and Posthaven have gained traction. Pixter is heavily inspired by these services, we want to thank Dalton and the team over at App.net for inspiring us."

Depending on which moderators are roaming at the time they may or may not force the title to be the article title, so often people just copy paste the article title straight in.

I don't like for the same reasons though, I'd prefer people put something descriptive there.

The title of the article is Pixter, the title here is between free vs paid and our motivation. In my opinion this was more descriptive, since that's what the article talk about

While I agree that the Glass title isn't very descriptive this one seems fine to me. It names two companies most people will be familiar with which makes it obvious that Pixter is a related company and this article will probably be about why they started it.

Not everyone uses iO(PO)S

Live filter is pretty cool though.

I have resigned myself to completely ignoring iOS-only products. It's less annoying that way.

As a person who cares about technology in general, its not that simple to make that choice. Especially when your just starting of…

Thanks for your feedback, will definitely look into it

I feel there's plenty of new technology around to make the cost of ignoring apps specific to a platform I don't use (at least on my phone, anyway) not a problem.

This whole product… The app and the web server was built by 2 guys in about 3 months… If we need to have good quality apps we need to spend time on them. We launched iOS first because of higher willingness to pay(usually). Stay tuned for more

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