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Comment by contextual | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, but I'm going to be a wet blanket here: you are seriously limiting your audience by making people install and host it themselves.

Even the fact it's on github is a big turnoff for a lot of potential users. Developers who want traction for their hard work should keep this in mind.

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This is a cool project from a developer... hosted on github... and made available freely for all. They decided to share it here. That's great.

Your blanket is entirely unwelcome.

I made what I perceived was a potentially valuable insight, and lightened my comment with an idiom. No need to get emo.

You don't even get it. Your insight is not very valuable, even in the slightest. I'm sorry your perception is so off, but it is for this community. Your allusion towards my social identity further puts you in the hole.

Nowhere in the original post did the creator even allude to this github post of project code being their customer facing product or business. Yet, you felt it necessary to provide your "potentially valuable insight." Guess what, it's not valuable. It's not interesting. It's not even useful.

This is a project someone created to share with everyone else. Not everything is a business ripe for money-grubbing fingers. We should be applauding this in every way possible, not giving the creator business advice.

Thank you. There is an instance running at www.reportr.io This is a side project which is targeting only developers right now, the project is not yet ready for everybody and I'm not ready to host so critical data from a large number of users.

Developers are actually good customers if you sell to their lazy points. Keep it OSS and offer a hosted plan with your API. Your API is rest, so offering a hosted service with a client-side js library can target a lot of wordpress or static page customers. The interface seems to be generic, maybe if you had some "prefab" use cases you could branch into analytics or developer-dashboard markets as well.

Developers who do stuff like this generally do it for themselves and people who are very similar to themselves. I've released quite a few products in a similar fashion requiring people to host and install it themselves and someone always makes this comment. I don't build software like this for other people, I build it for myself, I share it with everyone because someone else might want to build on top of it or use it, I don't really care if it "takes off" because it solves a personal problem in my own life.

>you are seriously limiting your audience by making people install and host it themselves.

Wordpress would like to have a word with you.

    krapp 4 minutes ago | link
    >you are seriously limiting your audience by making people install and host it themselves.
    Wordpress would like to have a word with you.

They host 72 million blogs [1], and I'm sure that the total number of WordPress blogs wouldn't be so high if they all had to be self-hosted.

[1] http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Yes, but I think it would be difficult to argue that Wordpress' popularity wasn't due to its being easier to install than Movable Type, at first. The ecosystem of plugins, themes and shops whose entire purpose is hacking Wordpress suggests that its still primarily used as an installed application, though I wouldn't doubt they get seriously good business from their hosted service.

81% of the internet do not use Wordpress: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/27/19-percent-of-the-web-runs...

~20% of the web is still not chump change.

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