
Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal - csmajorfive
http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal
======
mgkimsal
What was very annoying about the sourceforge story years ago was that the only
way they tried to monetize it was by selling "enterprise" versions. I wanted
to use SF (eventually did for a couple projects), but wanted to use it a lot,
but didn't want the ads. They shot themselves in the foot by not offering an
affordable subscription service. I'm happy to pay bitbucket/github/whoever
$x/month, but not $yyyy/month.

I may grow in to needing the $yyyy/month plan, but most people don't start off
at that end, and the majority of people who can afford something that
expensive (because they're an operating concern with a lot of money) probably
already have a solution in place (hence their ability to make money).

------
skue
As a hacker who just terminated his FB account, it sounds like I'm the target
audience. But I have to confess that after reading the blog post and clicking
through to the faux Kickstarter page, my response went from "That could be
interesting" to "That's disappointing."

If they are going to leverage the Kickstarter model, then they should at least
learn from other KS projects: show me the problem, build a prototype, show the
prototype solving the problem, play cool music, and for crying out loud look
at me (the camera) when talking.

There's probably a good reason that Kickstarter doesn't accept nebulous web
businesses - scaling manufacturing costs real money, but building a software
prototype is cheap. If someone had made a video dryly explaining GitHub or
DuckDuckGo as a concept prior to developing them, I wouldn't have signed up.
But I find them invaluable today.

~~~
graue
I agree. While the article got me interested, the video was disappointing. I
expected Dalton to show me something, not just talk for three minutes. In the
article, he writes "This isn’t vaporware." So where's the screencast?

Worse, he's not a very convincing speaker. The impatient demeanor, the failure
to look directly at the camera, and the multiple stitched-together takes all
suggest a lack of confidence. If you're not good at public speaking, fine, but
admit that and pick a better way to present your pitch.

Ultimately, I'm left feeling like the idea is a good one, but doubting whether
he is the right person to build it.

~~~
jon_dahl
This is a tangent, but Dalton is actually a really charismatic speaker. He was
probably the favorite speaker of my YC class, and was reportedly great at
Startup School a few years ago (though I wasn't there). Must come off better
in person.

~~~
zmitri
I think this is the talk you are referencing?

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-
caldwe...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwells-
must-see-talk-on-the-challenges-facing-music-startups/)

I very much enjoyed it.

------
guynamedloren
> _we have been spending the majority of our engineering resources the past 8
> months building a “secret project”.... Additionally, we already have much of
> this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure
> currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes,
> and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system.
> This isn’t vaporware._

So basically... it's already built.

> _To manifest this grand vision, we are officially launching a Kickstarter-
> esque campaign. We will only accept money for this financially sustainable,
> ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining
> minimum critical mass as $500,000, which is roughly equivalent to ~10,000
> backers._

Oh that's interesting. The grand vision will not manifest until $500k is
raised. But isn't the product already basically finished?

So what happens if they don't raise $500k? Do they kill the product and flush
8 months of hard work (and presumably a bunch of money) down the drain? Doubt
it. That doesn't make any sense.

Something is fishy here.

~~~
Kerrick
Crowd-sourcing has recently become a way to get free publicity and money, even
if something is already built. For example, Roll20.net launched a Kickstarter
campaign [1] with a tiny limit ($5,000) to build an online tabletop RPG. It
became quite popular, earning something like $40,000 by the time the
Kickstarter was over.

Here's the kicker: their Kickstarter video had an already-working demo! They
launched the closed-to-backers beta within weeks of the Kickstarter funding
closing, and opened it up to everybody within a few more weeks. They already
had a working product, they simply used Kickstarter as an advertising platform
that cost them NEGATIVE $39,651 and got them hundreds of loyal fans and
evangelists (their backers) and millions of eyeballs (through the media
covering their ~8x funding).

It's actually quite brilliant.

[1]:
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rileydutton/roll20-virtu...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rileydutton/roll20-virtual-
tabletop-gaming-that-tells-a-story)

------
noelsequeira
I'm not going to prognosticate about whether or not this service will take
off. I really hope it does - the raison d'être seems genuine, or at the very
least, passionately backed.

But that seems to be the very problem with it. In trying not to bury his lead,
I believe Dalton Caldwell has let it take over the pitch. 95% "why" and 5%
"what". 10 minutes in, I was still scratching my head wondering what the
service will look like. And the name App.net certainly doesn't do the cause
any favours. The first decent explanation finds itself relegated to question 2
of the FAQs.

This is an audacious attempt, and I laud that. But the pitch, in my opinion,
needs an overhaul. Diaspora was also about the "why", but they addressed the
"what" really early in their Kickstarter pitch.

------
benatkin
Seems odd to not actually use KickStarter. Won't running a homegrown
fundraising platform distract from solving the messaging problem? And don't
you have to make a case for something that KickStarter already spent a lot of
time making a case for? (I was turned off when I first heard about
KickStarter, and I still am, to a lesser extent, but I finally pitched in for
two projects.)

~~~
drhayes9
From the FAQ:

    
    
      Why aren't you using Kickstarter?
      We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the
      Kickstarter Terms Of Service explicitly prohibits raising
      money for this kind of service.

~~~
dalton
from <http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines>

"projects, projects, projects. As in all categories, Kickstarter is for
projects that can be completed, not things that require maintenance to exist.
This means no e-commerce sites, web businesses, or social networking sites.
(Yes, this means Kickstarter wouldn’t be allowed on Kickstarter. Funny, but
true.)"

~~~
joshschreuder
Which they broke with the Penny Arcade no-ad Kickstarter earlier this week.

------
jilebedev
What pain point exactly is this trying to solve? That twitter is ad-spammed?
I'll admit I rarely use twitter, but I can't recall ever seeing ads on it. (I
can, as a side note, recall how /slow/ twitter pages load.) That twitter
changes its API frequently and doesn't give adequate notice to the people who
develop for it? How exactly does a user interact with app.net? I signed up for
a twitter account because I wanted to hear a lot about a beta for a video
game. How does this work with app.net? Are only broadcasters paying members?

Kudos for taking on the big dogs, though.

~~~
pfraze
To me, Twitter's pain-point is that it's a platform that can kick off third-
party applications, doesn't have a way to extend its client, and doesn't allow
integration with similar services (last I checked its ToS). As a result, it's
software I can't fully control.

And I think that's the same pain-point with most of the Web right now. We
can't really evolve our web applications because we don't control them fully;
we have to accept the terms of the platform, which tends to be advertising
driven, which means they want to constrain the UI.

If you're tired of Twitter, you can't direct your Twitter interface to a new
service. If you want to add a new feature, you have to build an entirely new
interface and hope they never revoke your app's access. If you want to send a
private message, you have to share it with their logs.

This idea that we're building platforms is insane. Listen to Eben Moglen
(founder of Freedom Box) talk about this; you'll enjoy it. As he puts it, a
platform is a place that you can't leave. That's our pain point right now. We
need services that you choose and web apps that are compatible, not walled
gardens. Not for our applications, anyway.

So losing the advertising model has a pretty distinct advantage: it gets us
away from the platform model, where they have to control the way you access
the service so they can deliver the ads. I can't say how the business model
fits into that, but the engineering side definitely wins.

------
tgrass
_..the takeaway here is that the services provided by SourceForge/Github are
too important to its users to be ad-supported._

Why muddy the waters like that? The takeaway is that the incentives a company
adopts are consequential and will define the culture and the product.

~~~
zem
yeah, "importance" was a needless distraction from the main point, which was
that sourceforge and later twitter undeniably crappified their user and
ecosystem experience in pursuit of ad pennies.

------
danso
I hate to be old school media here...but I wish this was announced on Monday
or any other time besides Friday afternoon, when it will get less notice.
Because it's a great announcement.

~~~
nikcub
Funny because that is exactly the time that I advise most people to make their
announcements. When there are just as many people surfing the web looking for
news (our numbers at Techcrunch were higher pageviews per post on weekends)
but all the mainstream journalists and the PR people you are competing with
for attention are at home asleep.

The tech blogs that run 24/7 are dying for stories at this time of the week
since the PR production line comes to a halt on Friday. This announcement is
the second biggest tech story today[1] and has attracted comment from a bunch
of blogs. I think it barely would have registered on a Monday or Tuesday.

[1] <http://www.techmeme.com/120713/p37#a120713p37>

------
comex
So, this is a service where I'll pay $5 a month -ish to use a network that's
basically the same as Twitter (in particular, not decentralized), except with
no users and, considering the amount of effort being put into Twitter clients,
probably inferior clients? It'll have no ads, but the ads on Twitter are
pretty minimal from what I've seen, and presently as a third party client user
I don't get any. It'll be open to "apps" which can extend the experience (and
have a longer character limit), but to me Twitter's simplicity is its core
selling point. It'll supposedly be used by the top 10,000 hackers, but
identi.ca already tried that and it didn't work - network effect is important.

I love the spirit of this, but as described, I wouldn't use the service if it
were free. Twitter isn't even in the same ballpark as SourceForge. _shrug_

~~~
dalton
My belief is that it won't just be "Twitter with less users", but something
entirely different: <http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been>

For example, I remember hearing that Yammer and StockTwits toyed with building
on top of Twitter at one point, and decided that they were best off building
separate networks.

I am doing this project because rather than just complaining about how I think
things should go, I am going to personally do something about it. It will work
or it won't work, but at least I will know that I gave it a shot.

~~~
comex
Of course, I wish you the very best of luck. :)

------
drumdance
Am I the only one who doesn't feel like Twitter is hammering me with ads? OTOH
I don't use Twitter very much and when I do it's almost exclusively on my
phone or iPad.

~~~
tptacek
I can't recall ever having seen a Twitter ad.

But I think the subtext here isn't so much that Twitter is hammering people
with ads, so much as that their need to show users ads is causing them to
constrict the marketplace for Twitter applications --- anything that might get
in the way of an ad-supported strategy is, in this understanding of Twitter,
in jeopardy.

------
mgkimsal
Seems to me that 'ad supported' is always going to be more attractive to
funders/investors, because the _potential_ is effectively unlimited (certainly
by comparison with paid-for services).

With pay-for services, there's a much smaller number of people who are going
to (or be able to) pay, and when you start looking at those numbers, it's
never the fabled 'hockey stick to heaven' that people dream of.

What if twitter just sold access to their stream, and a few million orgs
(companies, individuals) were paying, oh, say, $20/month. And let's say... 2
million - why, that's only $480/million per year _maximum_! Gosh - who would
ever want to invest in _that_? Instead, by going with 'ads', there's always
the promise of some big change that could explode the revenue down the line.

~~~
ofrasergreen
Or the revenue could implode. Companies making money selling stuff people want
face competition from other companies making better stuff. Companies relying
on advertising as their main source of income compete with every other company
selling advertising space. For example, Old Media isn't hemorrhaging money
just because someone's selling better newspapers.

------
state
I love this idea, but the only reason I can come up with that you need half a
million dollars to do it is that it's a pivot, and not a bootstrapped
enterprise.

If GitHub is being used as the example in this line of argument, then why not
follow their lead and build something people need and raise money later?
Wouldn't you then be even more likely to convince hackers — the primary
community you're trying to serve?

~~~
scribu
What exactly do you mean by "follow Github's lead"? Github had a paid tier and
was profitable for years (and then raised money to expand), which sounds
exactly like the plan for app.net.

~~~
mvzink
Github didn't crowdfund $500,000 _before_ having a paid tier and being
profitable.

~~~
scribu
Fair point; I think I get what the OP was saying now.

But, from what I understood, with the current crowdfunding scheme you're
basically pre-ordering membership.

NB: I'm not really sold on the product idea myself, just trying to understand
the objections to the business model.

~~~
state
I'm not sure what bothers me so much about crowdfunding this. It just doesn't
seem quite right, and the use of GitHub as an example stood out as flawed. I
would definitely be more convinced by a great-but-buggy prototype than a video
of someone looking off in to the distance. I don't mean that as a jab: it's
symbolically kind of unsettling. You're talking about how much the community
matters, but you're talking to someone else.

To me, the proposed project touches on a much bigger issue of how Twitter is a
part of the internet infrastructure. Real time messaging has become really
important, and there's some anxiety around how that infrastructure can be a
part of the web in some trusted way.

Simply making Twitter community supported doesn't appear to me to be the best
decision. We've learned about some great potential from Twitter, and I'm much
more excited about something fully decentralized than I am interested in a
community supported Twitter clone.

------
sayemm
Anyone else thinking about Diaspora as soon as he mentioned Kickstarter?

Grandiose vision, but going to war with Twitter today is as foolish as trying
to take on Facebook.

You're not going to attract a mainstream audience and gain serious critical
mass just because you're an open platform and developer-friendly. In the case
of SourceForge/GitHub, it was different because the demographic is entirely
developers. Not so with social networks or media companies of any kind, the
audience is mainstream, that means college students, celebrities, high school
girls, etc.

"Every battle is won before it is ever fought" (Sun Tzu) -- learn from
Diaspora's failure, don't repeat it.

------
sylvaincarle
Amazing that there is no mention of <http://Status.net> anywhere this topic is
discussed.

Evan Prodromou has been trying to crack that nut for many years now...

------
khangtoh
Why screw over all the developers who had been using App.net? I assume that
their App Landing page developer service is going to retire if this new
product goes.

------
fauigerzigerk
I'm probably not the target audience for this because I don't understand what
the proposal is. Or maybe I'd have to read some of his earlier posts to
understand what this is about.

What is a real time feed and service or a social platform in general? Is this
basically Facebook sans the UI for a monthly fee?

------
maxogden
Are there github accounts for the 'team to do it' that contain the
'infrastructure'?

~~~
state
This is exactly the right question to ask. Now I'm pretty sure I phrased it
wrong.

------
rudiger
Will there be a free tier?

------
mkramlich
Summary: "I propose receiving $500k USD of your money (with terms like
Kickstarter, but not actually via Kickstarter) to build my new startup, in
exchange for giving you zero equity. I know it's audacious."

