107 karma · joined October 8, 2011
@ davelocity
If the problem is user acquisition, you don't get there with engineering improvements. Only exception is if those tech/product improvements are for increasing virality.
Yes they'll probably spend the money on marketing / PR, which makes sense since that's likely where the bottleneck (or foreseeable bottleneck given the other players in the industry) in their business is now.
I agree that there could be better ways to serve the popup (time-delay, wait until 2nd article viewed, etc) but if your argument is simply "turn it off because I dont like it, and it will never work" -- go look it up. One such example:
http://danzarrella.com/my-data-shows-email-popups-work-and-d...
the key bit is that on Pie, everything gets a mini chatroom. so every discussion is focused. we're betting that as people share more and more stuff, they'll value group chat apps that help them organize and structure all these things.
on Flowdock, Slack, Hipchat, etc, people usually talk in a "catch-all" chatroom like "Product team" or "Marketing team" which (in our experience) gets messy quickly and it can get hard to share information there. it's often a mishmash of links, files, images and conversations.
So, Pie is great if you're in a team that shares a boatload of info: links, files, etc. gives you a message board layout as opposed to one huge stream.
For anyone looking for alternatives, my startup is working on something similar (share + chat what you find with your team: http://piethis.com
Should be a solvable issue unless he gets really really popular.