

Six Months of Pinboard - wyclif
http://pinboard.in/blog/57/

======
prakash
I have been using pinboard for 6+ months, excellent service, does exactly what
you want a bookmarking service to do. And, Maceiej and PVG are very
responsive.

~~~
pvg
Glad to hear you're finding the service useful. Beside eliminating spam and
keeping growth manageable, the 'every user is a paying user' model is a very
effective motivator for providing prompt response to customer feedback, bug
reports, feature requests, etc.

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axod

      >> Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users,
      >> we store copies of all bookmarks in an account for $25 per year
      >> the site has reached the point where I can work on it full-time
    

That's pretty impressive, low living costs?

Lets say 1% sign up to premium, that's 12 premium accounts, @ $25/yr for a
total of $300/year or $25/month :/

Cool to see this sort of post though, and great to hear peoples progress etc.

~~~
anotherjesse
Additional income comes from signup - current fee is $5.69 to join. They
increase the cost by $0.001 each time a user signs up. (not where they started
the price, but assuming $0.01 that could be another $16190.90)

I like the idea of charging a nominal fee to signup (or perhaps just to have a
"pro" account)

~~~
axod
Ah sorry, I missed that :) Interesting.

How do you get $16k :/

Avg price = ($5.69 + ($5.69 - $0.001 * 1200)) / 2

= $5.09

$5.09 * 1200 = $6,108

~~~
pvg
1200 is not the total number of users.

~~~
axod
ah. The important word being '1200 _active_ users'?

I'll stop trying to over analyze now :)

Congrats on growth so far anyway

~~~
pvg
Thanks! And you're right, it's active users and I think they were defined as
'used in last 30 days' in the draft Maciej showed me but it seems to have
somehow dropped out of the final post.

As to over-analyzing, it's the meat and potatoes of HN. I'd be happy to
clarify or answer any questions (best posted at top level as HN likes to
assume deep-nesting is a sign of a dreadful flame-war and imposes its timed
lockouts).

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samstokes
Does Pinboard have a Firefox extension (or plans for one)? I'd love to have an
alternative to Delicious, but the smoothness of their Firefox integration is
so good it not only keeps me using Delicious, it also keeps me using Firefox.

Some reasons I like it so much:

* Ctrl-D to bookmark, just like vanilla Firefox

* Ctrl-D on an already-bookmarked page to edit tags / description for that page

* Ctrl-B for an always-up-to-date bookmark pane, with FAYT by title or tag

* "Open in tabs" for any tag (I use this daily for the webcomic update-checking ritual, and occasionally for actually useful things)

* Awesome Bar integration by title or tag (bit flaky but great when it works)

* Dropdowns for user-defined "favourite tags" in a menu bar (this plus a "todo" tag is almost as good, for me, as a natively supported "toread" feature)

~~~
pvg
It's something that's planned but I doubt it's going to be quite as
heavyweight as the del one. Replacing the standard local bookmark shortcuts
also seems a little intrusive to me. Open tag in tabs and and 'favourite tags'
menu sound quite useful though.

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rams
The post URLs form is responsive generally compared to delicious' form which
at times is totally unresponsive.

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moon_of_moon
Feature point #1, "spare user interface" should be "sparse user interface"?

~~~
pvg
It's a user interface, not a matrix.

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wyclif
The only part of this I didn't really grok is that the blog says pvg was a co-
founder of del.icio.us. I always thought the co-founders were @joshu and Pete
Frietas.

~~~
charltones
Apparently not...
<http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2005/05/yeah_sure_consi.html>

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mey
Random, non-thought provoking, press release in the shape of a blog.

The only semi-interesting (imo) tid-bit relayed is charging for services
prevent spam, but that isn't new or uncommon.

~~~
andrewljohnson
These sort of data-supported, direct insights into personal experiences in
entrepreneuship are valid and excellent content.

I upvoted the article and downvoted you for your bad mood ;)

~~~
mey
Yes I was in a bad mood when I wrote the above, but I feel my point still
stands. There was very little meat of anything to gain. Yes you see 6 months
they obtained 1200 users, and it's sufficient to support the operations, and
they didn't take any VC money. There was nothing in the article about what
they overcame to get to their position. Maybe they didn't and got very lucky,
but luck is just one aspect of getting a company successfully running. I'd be
more interested in a recap 1.5 years from now where they have had more growing
pains, more trials, and more interesting successes.

Alternately just say you want me to check out a centralized bookmarking site.

