
Posterous cofounders create a replacement: Posthaven - garry
https://posthaven.com
======
jbail
How can anyone believe this will hold true? Especially coming from the
founders of Posterous who sold out and then shuttered their service?

Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users
were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't
sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat
users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.

Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous
is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be
negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.

~~~
garry
When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever.
It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-
funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not
sustainability. We never started charging for the product.

Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a
simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make
the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.

I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a
startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.

~~~
jbail
On the one hand, you have street cred for building an awesome product which
inspires confidence that your next product will be awesome too. I don't doubt
it will be awesome.

But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming
nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for
whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will
stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever
raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities
change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel
right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that
right now only lasts an instant.

~~~
garry
Thanks jbail -- I don't want to dig up the past, but the truth of the matter
was I didn't agree with my cofounder on the direction of Posterous, but I also
wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in. It was
one of the most painful experiences to have to walk away from my baby.

I think we're put on this earth to create things of great lasting value that
are good for others around us. Many things in our lives will change, but I
believe this one is a constant guiding light.

~~~
tferris
> I also wanted to support him in his pursuit of the direction he believed in

Support him? By bailing out? Was it easy for your cofounder to replace your
skillset? Would love to hear the whole story if you don't mind, it could help
help others who are in similar situations. It's sad that cofounders who once
created something together are not able to find a common understanding in
later stages. Sad that both parties reached that point where they have to
utter the threat either my way or I leave. WTF. I know this is common and
probably _the_ reason why most startups fail but just leaving (or maybe the
true story was different) sounds a bit strange. However, maybe it was the best
decision for the organization.

~~~
coldtea
> _Support him? By bailing out?_

Support him BEFORE he bailed out. Ie. he supported the VC thing, although he
didn't like the direction.

As for the "skill-set", it's not as if building a web service, and such as
simple one as posterous (or twitter, or tumblr) is rocket science.

Scaling it is a little harder, but still, thousands of companies and websites
do it on their own. So what What ireplaceable skillset?

------
ChuckMcM
Its an interesting proposition, but fundamentally broken. Lets say you build
it (and frankly I think a better course here would have been something based
on the app.net model rather than WP Engine model) and its "successful" what
does that mean to you?

Here is the challenge, there are too many scenarios where you don't want to
be.

#1) "SPLOGGING" or some random thing becomes the new thing which all the cool
kids are doing. You've got just enough customers to keep you in Ramen so
you're committed to working until you're 70 and can augment your income with
Social Security to honor this commitment to those few.

#2) You've spent 20 years maintaining the service, answering the same
questions, fighting the same fires, dealing with the same sort of "Chrome v286
can't display tri-graphs properly without mime support from the replacement
for nginx" kinds of problems.

#3) Its wildly successful and someone offers to make you a billionaire if you
sell it to them?

In contrast I like the foundation idea. Foundations don't get tired, they
don't get tempted, they just execute against their created principals. A
foundation with an endowment that runs a service which supplies a voice for
bloggers for a computed value which is not to exceed 15% of the operating cost
of the service. That is a durable kind of construction, the people in it are
just employees, they turn over like students in a college or wait staff at a
restaurant. Its a chunk of money, controlled by a legal document, implemented
by a management structure, to create a service in perpetuity.

Don't build a business and promise not to sell it, build an institution that
is self contained.

~~~
garry
Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads
down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to
do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

~~~
8ig8
A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals.
The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external
factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage
of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to
invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal
stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to
individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided
financial support.

Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A
foundation provides some insurance for my investment.

------
iSnow
Great - until that one gets acquired or acqui-hired by Facebook|MS|Google...

I wish there were some open source resource sharing protocol a bit more high-
level than HTTP.

~~~
garry
Like Brad said -- this one is not to be sold. We'll charge money and keep the
lights on no matter what. We want to provide this service like a basic utility
like water and power, because that's what having a voice on the Internet
should be.

~~~
fotbr
Why should I trust that this will last longer, given the same people are
involved? The fact that you charge $5 / month? What do I get for $5 / month
versus, say, my own VPS running whatever blog software I choose for the same
money (or less)?

~~~
garry
I have run many personal servers. They all come and go. They get hacked. I
lose interest. The content goes away forever, except if I'm lucky enough for
it to get picked up in <http://archive.org>. Posthaven is like that, but you
don't have to hope. It will get archived.

Self-hosting is great and I don't think we'll ever replace it. But for the
vast majority of personal content out there, you want a caretaker. I hope
you'll think of us when you do.

~~~
benatkin
Self-hosting is great and it has better solutions to these problems than the
alternative.

And you absolutely do have to hope.

------
argumentum
Why are people so cynical? I know garry, and he is one of the most honest and
generous people around. I signed up .. posterous was awesome and should live
on.

From personal experience, doing a startup is _so hard_ that judging the co-
founders without knowing the full context is just wrong.

------
jwwest
So much negativity for something that doesn't matter all that much. Does
anyone believe that anything can truly be around forever? Will Posthaven be
around in 5 years? Probably. 10? Looking dimmer. 20? No way.

I look at it like your favorite store. Every year the odds of something
dramatic happening in which it will shut down are played against it.
Everything is transient, it's life. I've bounced around a lot of blogging
platforms, and personally it's not a huge deal at all. Sure, it's a bit of a
pain to spend a day or so settling in and changing your DNS, but is it really
that bad?

When someone says "it'll be around forever" my BS radar starts beeping like
mad. And that's ok.

------
davewiner
Garry, thanks for doing this new project. We need services that are
sustainable long-term. We need a solid ad-free place that people can post
their thoughts and have a decent chance of having them stick around as long as
the web exists.

Also suggest that you think about a pre-paid plan, for say $1000, to purchase
lifetime hosting, assuming you can find a way to invest the money that pays a
return that sustains the service.

Also consider partnering with some long-lived institutions, like universities,
that might play a role in guaranteeing the "forever" part of the proposition.

Another possibility -- sell stock to your users. There's no reason you can't
make a fortune doing this. But if you go with VC money that's going to put you
on a path that isn't sustainable. If you sell stock to the public with the
clear up-front understanding that this is to be a sustainable business, that
might strengthen the company, not weaken it.

~~~
davewiner
BTW, I received my Posterous archive and linked to it from this piece, in case
anyone wants to explore.

<http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/posterousArchive>

------
Jeraimee
I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece
together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already
paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing
will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How
dare they.

~~~
r0s
Why would you invent your own system? They have migration tools for existing
frameworks...

~~~
Jeraimee
I cobbled a system together from existing options. I may however - build my
own 'alike and open source it after all this.

------
aaronpk
I'm curious how you guys arrived at $5/month. Is it based more on what you
expect people are willing to pay, or based more on how much you expect this to
cost to operate?

------
peterkelly
Or you could set up your own domain + wordpress installation and not have to
rely on any one company remaining in existence forever.

It's pretty easy to switch if necessary (admittedly assuming you have the
right technical skills).

------
antirez
It's very peculiar that the way this service is presented is the exception,
while it should be the rule. Actually most businesses should try to have this
in mind: provide a service that users want and are willing to pay for and try
to be cheap and sustainable.

I understand there is also space for "give it for free, grow like crazy", but
the fact that it is now the norm is extremely odd IMHO. Most founders now
optimize for VC rounds apparently.

------
aaronpk
Sustainable. "503 Service Unavailable"

~~~
garry
It's back. Sorry about that.

We're starting over from scratch with a new codebase only recently, and
there's infrastructure we still need to build. I scaled Posterous from nothing
to tens of millions of uniques with my cofounder Brett, so we'll be able to
keep it online for the long haul.

Please bear with us though through this launch period.

~~~
evv
It's not back for me. You guys must be sweating right now

~~~
garry
That we are. Sorry for the inconvenience. To be honest, we had no word on
specifically when Posterous would shut down.

------
wyck
I'm sorry but the only thing that lives up to this kind of hype is open source
and run by a community.

I'll stay with Jekyll and WordPress.

------
bfe
Thanks very much for making this available, garry, I appreciate it.

(FYI I'm still getting the 503 for now but I'll keep checking in.)

~~~
garry
Please visit <https://posthaven.com> for now. Brett and I are working on
fixing the servers asap.

~~~
bfe
Thanks. Getting an SSL connection error there, and it's actually sunny in
Portland right now so I need to get outside for a run, I'll check back after.

~~~
aaronpk
I am also from Portland and can confirm that today's sun is definitely
significant.

------
mceoin
Hi Garry,

This is a simple feature request but as someone who writes occasionally it is
really important to me: will I be able to customize the domain name to have it
as myname.com instead of posthaven.com/myname?

~~~
garry
Yes, this will definitely be in the product and supported 100%.

------
minimaxir
Whoever made this should submit an application to be in the next YC batch. I
have a strong feeling they would get in. :)

~~~
dylangs1030
The cofounders of Posterous. They don't need YC. They were in YC.

~~~
amirmc
One of them, Garry, is a YC partner [1]

[1] <http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron>

[The irony of linking to a Posterous post is not lost on me - I wonder when
that link will be dead]

------
kkt262
This idea seems ridiculous. I really hope your main selling point is not the
fact that your website will last forever.

Let's not even go into the fact that there's a high likelihood this project
won't even take off considering the high amount of competition out there.

But there are tons of uncontrollable situations that you MIGHT run into, even
if there's a 0.01% chance that it will happen.

\- What if someone sues you and you go bankrupt?

\- What if someone offers to buy you out for 1 billion dollars?

\- What if (God forbid) one of the original founders passes away and the rest
of the founders decide it's no longer worth it to keep it going?

\- What if the founding team just realizes the project is no longer for them?

\- What if after the founding team retires, the people that they pass it onto
decide THEY don't want to keep going with it?

I'm just not buying it, and I feel like a lot of people will have the same
skepticism.

------
dnrevel
@ScoopIt (curation) launched with a layered, freemium model that made sense,
as compared to the discussions around Posterous I heard, that even non-techies
asked about -- what IS the funding model for Posterous.

I like the idea of $5/month. Why not sell it??? Let go of it twitter!!!

I've been a BIG Posterous fan, have 20+ blogs on it public and private, used
to run a few courses, but started pulling away when the rumors and the
"BackUp" button appeared.

It's NOT too late, is it? What a great story it would make to pull it back
from the brink for all those semi-tech literates who can build wonderful sites
on Posterous. Does someone need to start a petition to bug twitter about
this??

------
webwanderings
What does it offer for $5 a month? Wordpress.com charges as well and the bill
runs up to a lot of money for typical bells and whistles needed to run a blog.
Google blogspot is still pretty much free all around. Tumblr is the same.

~~~
garry
We think the world still needs a Posterous-like blog engine that is simpler to
use for everyone else. Posterous got quite complicated after I left, and I
think the world needs the simple version again quite a lot.

~~~
webwanderings
The world has an option to sign-up for a free blog through Google, Tumblr and
even wordpress.com (though Wordpress.com's free is not free like
Google/Tumblr). So what makes you think the world will sign up for $5 service?

~~~
garry
I am not here to 'kill' those services. Previously with Posterous we were very
aggressive about that. I think people should use the service that is best for
them. For some it will be wordpress.com, self-hosted Wordpress, Squarespace,
and others.

We're making it for ourselves. It's a long-term project. If we make good
software, then it doesn't matter if there are 500 users or 5 million.

~~~
benatkin
> Previously with Posterous we were very aggressive about that.

LOL. I remember that. [http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/posterous-targets-
ning-in-m...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/posterous-targets-ning-in-
massive-switching-campaign-who-is-next/)

------
benrhughes
This would have been perfect around a year ago. Once the writing was on the
wall, I migrated 4 or 5 sites (kinda, mostly) to self hosted Wordpress. I
would have happily shelled out $5/mth to go to posthaven, had it existed.

Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in
node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.

On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free
services, no matter how good the feature set.

[1]<http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown>

~~~
woah
Why not just use docpad? <https://github.com/bevry/docpad>

~~~
benrhughes
Because it's taken me less time to write my own thing, that does exactly what
I want, than it usually takes me to configure and customise wordpress.

Also, (and this is the main reason, really) it's just a lot of fun.

------
geuis
I'm curious about the need to build this from a new code base. Posterous
already exists. Why not negotiate a deal with twitter to aquire the code and
start posthaven from that? Indeed, why not also aquire the posterous domain
and just migrate to new servers? Put all existing blogs on lockdown, and if
people want to continue as posterous customers they start paying $5 a month.

------
eel
This may seem like a silly question, but can I cancel at any time? It says $5
a month forever, and I don't see any terms of service.

------
oob205
Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable
business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No
company can guarantee that, no matter how good.

------
conroy
A sustainable replacement already exists: statically generated website on S3.
You own the domain, and there is very little chance that S3 is going away
anytime soon.

It will also be cheaper than $5/month.

------
pmtarantino
If I read it correctly, you can pay only the months when you write a post. If
you don't plan to write this month, you can avoid paying.

------
rdl
What's the advantage of posthaven over svbtle?

------
gudman
How can anyone make this kind of promise?

------
fiendsan
yeah im gonna skip on that one... track record and all...

------
Blogette
1\. When Garry says "forever," I think he means in comparison to the now-dead
posterous; & not necessarily "forever" as in "All of God's Eternity"!

2\. At least you picked a decent name, PostHaven. I always hated the name
Posterous. And the brown/yellow logo. Ugh!

3\. As a non-techie I would pay $60/year for 10-blogs, BUT NOT if it will be
as bad as Posterous which worked like pure crap for email-posting (yet that
was their big Come On!) From Summer 2009 for 6 months it worked fine, then
something changed & it never worked well after that (only headlines would post
with empty body content!!!) Wasted TONS of time & energy trying to get answers
from them & only got the run-around. It was a miserable nightmare for
20-months when I finally bailed in Spring 2011 & went to WP.com, & that was
after seeing a post at Computerworld that there was a bug between Gmail &
Posterous!!! Yet Posterous didn't know that? Pfff! Wp.com works excellent for
email-posting & w/Gmail/iPhone. Make it like WP.com & maybe will consider...

4\. Do not make the account-email address the ONLY addy that can be email-
posted FROM. Give us a "special post to" addy like WP does so we can post by
email from ANY of our email addys, & not just the ONE connected to account.
That was another royal PITA thing about Posterous. We should not have to add
ALL of our addys as add'l "users" just to be able to post-by-email from
DIFFERENT addys. I cannot even express how arse-backward-miserable that set-up
was!! If PostHaven sets it up that same way, no thanks!

5\. Do not have Tags in the Subject Line like Posterous did!! Did it ever
occur to those guys we might send our post to Posterous & elsewhere at the
same time? (such as Email Groups?) Then the other list shows the stupid Tags
in the Subject Line! Bad idea!

6\. Don't make the Default "Gallery" so that we have to type "NO GALLERY" in
every stinking email! Or at least let US, the user, SET the DEFAULT CHOICE.

7\. Let us choose AT LEAST 1-global FONT for the blog body & headlines,
VERDANA, crystal clear, best READABLE font.

8\. Let us choose AT LEAST 2-global Font SIZES for the blog body text &
headline. NO TEENY TINY STINKING FONT SIZES!

9\. Let us choose AT LEAST 3-global Font COLORS: links, headlines, body text
(#000000 BLACK body TEXT >> & NO STINKING "INVISIBLE GREY" FONT ANYWHERE!!)

WP.com wants $30/YEAR for the "privilege" to change global font, font size,
font colors. If it was a one-time-$30-fee, fine, but not every year (10 blogs
would be $300 PER YEAR just to have a decent font!)

10\. Let us choose ALL Theme COLORS, background, menu bars, Blog's Title, etc.

11\. Themes: WP.com & Posterous both have & had CRAPPY UGLY themes. You can
tell that it is mostly GUYS designing all the hideous themes, because women
would know better! (design, colors, layout, FUNCTION), but unfortunately, we
are not the tech geeks! If PostHaven themes will be as crappy, it won't be
worth switching, unless total flexibility is INCLUDED (see #8-9-10 above).

\--Have several "Magazine" type themes, Photoblogging themes, Portfolio
themes, etc., that actually WORK with EMAIL-blogging! (Most of them DON'T,
including the one Posterous had! The first photo should show up on site but
they never did! -- The only WP.com "magazine" theme that works w/email-posting
is Triton Lite & it has a hideous white film over it & TEEEENY TINY INVISIBLE
GREY FRONT, making it a total loser of a theme).

\--Or, let us dl free or paid themes from 3rd parties elsewhere to use on our
blogs & you guys could forego the whole themes disasters. (WP.com has paid
themes but quite pricey $75-$150, & I think you STILL have to buy the CSS
Upgrade just to change fonts/sizes/colors!)

12\. Let us decide WHERE we want the DAY, DATE, & TIME of each post! (At the
TOP, under the Headline, NOT out to the side wasting space, NOR at the bottom
of the posts! Ugh!)

13\. WIDGETS! & SHORTCODES! (for archives, search, RSS Feeds, Twitter Stream,
HTML-Text-&-Images boxes, videos, etc.) Frankly, I don't see why the wheel
needs to be RE-invented... it must be a "guy thing." Just copy what WP.com has
already invented, but add the flexibility that WP.com does not include & I
would gladly give you $60/year for 10-blogs.

14\. Oh, & allow users to have ADS!!! Posterous was always promising they were
going to allow users to have ads, but they never did (all the while they were
Vigi-linking everyone's blogs!)

15\. And if being able to use our own domains is INCLUDED, that would be
GREAT. WP.com wants $18/Year for that privilege (10 blogs = $180) plus annual
domain fees.

16\. Will PostHaven be hosting .PDFs, .MP3s, Videos, etc. like Posterous did?
That was ONE good thing!

17\. BUT I'm not willing to sign up in advance because there's no way to know
if any of the other above miseries from prior Posterous & current WP.com will
be the same at PostHaven or not. But will keep an eye out to see how it
develops.

------
g2bsocial
Not real impressed that it can't handle a HN load.

~~~
garry
We fixed one setting in our HAProxy that was causing an insane bottleneck.

We'd been working on it for a while, but had no idea it would be launching
today and should have been more prepared.

Sorry about that. Please give us another shot.

------
largesse
This begs the question: if the acquisition was talent acquisition why couldn't
they have just sold the Posterous name and software?

~~~
ricardobeat
<http://begthequestion.info>

~~~
largesse
Descriptivist. Sorry ;-)

------
helloamar
If you can have a option of installing your platform on our own server like
Wordpress, most of us won't hesitate to sign up

