
From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur - conesus
http://blog.newsblur.com/post/18561597889/going-full-time
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patio11
Congrats! Charge more. It has all manner of upsides, such as decreasing emails
written by people who think $12 is a lot of money, and also means you won't
have 20% COGS for a software service.

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pixelmonkey
Not only is Samuel an amazing developer, but he is also the perfect person to
build the news reader of the future. Check out his Github repo for some of the
cleanest Python / JS code you'll ever come across.
<https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur>

I worked on a personalized news reader in 2009
([http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/11/parsely-a-feed-
rea...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2009/11/parsely-a-feed-reader-that-
ada.php)). We decided ultimately to abandon the project to pursue Parse.ly
Dash, a media analytics tool. When we were winding down Parse.ly Reader, I
discovered Newsblur. I can say confidently that NewsBlur gets everything
"right" that we got "wrong" in our original design. I now use NewsBlur as my
primary reader and I am a paying customer. I have also evangelized it to my
friends. I am really excited that Samuel is going to go full-time on this
project and make it one of the best pieces of software on the web for news
junkies like me.

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mgeraci
I am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking
take on RSS feeds.

As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their
last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding
social features are.

(fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog
post, [http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-
revie...](http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-review), and
there is a social branch on github,
<https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/social>)

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quanticle
First, let me thank you for providing a welcome alternative to those of us who
were turned off by the "improvements" to Google reader. You made migrating
dead-simple and that was a big factor in my choosing NewsBlur over other RSS
sites.

My question, though, is that RSS usage seems to have plateaued, and may even
be declining. Twitter, especially, has taken a fairly hard line in treating
RSS as a second class citizen. Do you think there's a risk that other sites
will move away from RSS in favor of social media, and, if so, do you have any
plans to deal with that eventuality?

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conesus
I don't see NewsBlur as competing with other RSS feed readers, many of which
are seeing declining use and are either folding or are in the process of
folding. NewsBlur, on the other hand, is doing very well because I'm charging
people and can afford the popular opinion of "declining popularity" so long as
it means revenue keeps increasing.

You have to remember that NewsBlur is unlike any other reader. It shows the
original site, it filters and highlights stories, and it's being actively
developed. There is a huge swatch of sites for which using Twitter is no
substitute. You just want to read every post from those Tumblrs. You don't
want to miss what Gruber is saying on Daring Fireball. And Salt & Fat podcasts
are only once a week. You sure you want to rely on catching that single tweet
a week that gives the link?

As long as the technology is good, I think there's an enormous market, full of
people struggling to keep up with a dozen blogs by having to manually visit
them all every day.

I'm not going for the expert RSS readers who use RSS in a way I never did. I
followed 40-some sites when I started building NewsBlur. I now follow around
110. I never used Google Reader, and I think there's a lot more people like me
than the ones who were already hooked on RSS.

~~~
zargon
My concern is that my ability to get feeds for news I want to follow is being
reduced as people move to social networks. As you say, I can't count on
catching one tweet or facebook post in the flood of messages. But sometimes
people are only posting updates on social media.

I'm a premium subscriber on NewsBlur and love it. I was never satisfied with a
reader until NewsBlur came around.

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jfb
Love the product; sadly, I am so stuck on Reeder (backed by Google) that I
can't bring myself to change. Now, a Reeder backed by Newsblur …

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mitchellhislop
I know Reeder is adding Fever as a login in the next iPhone version - maybe we
could get NewsBlur on that list somewhere

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talbina
Samuel, I just wanted to let you know that you are a huge inspiration to me
even though you don't know me. I remember your first post when you said you
did the first version of your site while commuting on the NYC subway every
day.

That small piece of info is my driving force every week as I recall how
productive other entrepreneurs can be. So thank you.

~~~
conesus
Originally this blog post was going to be a "and so can you" type post. I
thought it was kind of important to set the tone to say that I'm a schlub who
just pushed hard enough on the persistence/patience/perseverance/perspiration
mix. It ended up being all about me instead, but I'm still working on the post
in my head.

I'm not especially productive. I just work relentlessly on NewsBlur, every
single day. Check the graph on <http://github.com/samuelclay>. There's another
year before that of the same persistent pushing. And oftentimes I think that I
take more than twice the time others do to get something like a distributed
feed fetcher built. But push through it and one day you're shipping.

My first year was all internal motivation. But after I launched, that very
quickly switched to external motivation. I added NewsBlur's Get Satisfaction
forum to the dashboard of every NewsBlur user. That way I get a lot more
feedback about the product. I had to build that little table by hand, even
writing a cronjob to grab the latest feedback so it would show up instantly
for users just logging in, but that was so clearly the basis for my external
motivation.

Getting paid, on the other hand, was never a motivation. It just didn't occur
to me that I could live off NewsBlur. Even today, that's not the case. But I'm
taking a gamble by going full-time, spending the next few months cranking out
my big social branch, and seeing if there's something bigger in NewsBlur.
Luckily, at this rate, simply monetizing the current site might be enough to
keep me off the streets.

~~~
petercooper
I had a similar experience to you 2004-2007 with an RSS-to-everything service
called Feed Digest. It started as a way to get my Delicious links onto my blog
and eventually turned into my full time job with 25k users. I sold it in 2007
after a number of mistakes on my part: [http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-
years-ago-i-sold-my-st...](http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i-
sold-my-startup.html)

Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and
I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not
charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough
to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout
situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time
either.

So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I
pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business
model that makes this project _comfortable_ to run, rather than just enough to
keep you off the streets, as it were.

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swah
Only now I realized that Newsblur loads the original page for each feed unlike
Google Reader - very nice.

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tantalor
What do you think of pinboard's one-time payment formula?

 _The fee is based on the formula (number of users times $0.001), so the
earlier you join, the less you pay._

Currently it is just shy of $10.

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conesus
Love the idea, but it wouldn't work for NewsBlur. While Pinboard charges once
for being able to store bookmarks and all of the associated meta-data, he
actually charges $25/year for the archival subscription, which is where a
whole lot more work happens.

NewsBlur has to fetch millions of sites regularly, whether you're on the site
or not. Eventually I step down the fetching of sites that have few active
users, but it's still expensive to do a whole lot of feed fetching and
parsing. It's not much, but then again, neither is $1/month.

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Concours
Congratulations Samuel, I see you have read my email (I'm the Dude from
FeedsAPI), that's the way to go. Good Luck and if I can ever help make
Newsblur more awesome, it'll be a pleasure.

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revorad
Congratulations! I didn't know Newsblur was open source, that's awesome.

Good luck, Samuel. Don't forget to change the company name on your Github
profile ;-)

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conesus
Yeah, I noticed that my Stack Overflow profile was outdated, as well as GitHub
and others. In fact, my personal blog still says I'm working on DocumentCloud.

This is a problem needing solving. Or not.

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solutionyogi
It looks beautiful and I am a sucker for beautiful things. Immediately signed
up for premium membership. I wish you good luck in your adventure.

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thedjpetersen
I met Samuel at the last startup school, he seemed like an outstanding guy and
a very good developer. Congrats and good luck!

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Dejital
Great news! NewsBlur and Pinboard are the only web services I pay for. Very
excited to see that you are growing.

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adamjernst
Congratulations Samuel, and good luck!

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jQueryIsAwesome
Congrats! I wish you a continuous chain of awesome events for you and your
project.

In another note; is nice that you are trying to be unobtrusive with your
visitors but I think your design is conversion-flawed; the register form and
(after that) the premium benefits should really stand out!

Rough sketches of what i mean: <http://i.imgur.com/Gy569.jpg>
<http://i.imgur.com/sKwZF.jpg>

~~~
Concours
Any chance to see you add your email in your pofile? I'm traing to get in
touch with you, my email is in my profile.

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xxiao
on the homepage the most unimpressive news are, hacknews everything else looks
better maybe newsblur can grab the first page of wherever hacknews is pointing
to?

