

Lanyrd: the early days - honest story of our startup's launch - simonw
http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/lanyrd-the-early-days/

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nemesisj
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.

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simonw
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.

~~~
spazmaster
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.

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natbat
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.

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camworld
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!

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simonw
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.

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brackin
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.

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

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TallboyOne
Does revenue from affiliate book sales actually cover your costs?

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simonw
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!

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

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photorized
Very inspirational, best of luck to you.

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kategleason
really enjoyed this read.

