
What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap - tnorthcutt
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
======
tokenadult
Patrick notes in detail that the post is written with Colin's approval. I am
not a customer of any of Patrick's services, nor am I a customer of Colin's,
although perhaps I should be a customer of both. The most telling part of the
post is right here, beginning with a quotation from the Tarsnap FAQ:

" >Q: What happens when my account runs out of money?

" >A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days
worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to
your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose
access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day
countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7
days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.

"Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf
your backups if you fail to respond to two emails.

"Guess how I found out about this?"

That says it all.

~~~
steveklabnik
I am a customer of Colin's, though I almost had a very similar scenario
happen. Luckily, my understanding of crypto caught it, and Colin is quick to
answer emails, so I'm good to go (for the most part...)

Here was my deal: I stupidly told my computer to upgrade libc, and only after
apt completely failed and wrecked the machine to the point of `ls` not working
did I realize that I had some personal data that wasn't backed up. Of course.

My plan was thus: use an Ubuntu LiveUSB, upload a copy of /home/steve to
Tarsnap, then install Ubuntu, and be on my way. As I was compiling Tarsnap, I
realized that my mental model of machines on Tarsnap was probably wrong: it's
not that I have a Tarsnap account, with access given to a set of keys. It's
that each key has its own backup. So what I _almost_ did was upload an
encrypted backup of all my stuff, then wipe the drive and the key, never
(hopefully!) to see my data again. :(

Even when you're technical and know about this stuff, you can screw it up,
because you're still human.

~~~
soneca
I think _that_ is the point for improving UI and how the service is served.
The more geekie you are the less help you need for the easy stuff, but more
tragic is the result when you eventually crash.

Just like the best (arguably, maybe I should say boldest) drivers are the ones
who get killed on car accidents. When you are too confortable on driving at
80Mph is when you are closest to die. And it is when you need more help, more
user-friendly interface, more insurance to keep you safe from your own
mistakes.

Keeping all of UI difficult just to please the geekies will actually harm some
of them pretty bad eventually.

Also I find interesting how a lot of people is forcing to Colin a very
romanticized idea of a "not for the money" entrepreneur that just want to keep
things in this raw state. Sounds to me that Patrick is closer to Colin than
anyway creating this image of him.

------
GBond
There is this hole-in-the-wall looking place in NYC chinatown that serves
Chinese comfort food meal. It closes real late and remains affordable while
serving great meals. It is frequented by Michelin star rated restaurant chefs
(of all cuisines) for the after dinners hours mostly through word-of-mouth.

Now I'm certain that the owner of the place knows he can charge more and
rebrand to the mass audience. But I'd like to think it is a point of pride
that his successful peers enjoy his services and that trumps any desire to
change from the status quo.

He is happy being Chef2Chef and I'm glad Colin is happy being Geek2Geek.

~~~
bambax
A businessman is on vacation on an island; walking on the beach, he comes
across a middle-aged man sitting next to a very small rusty boat.

\- What do you do?

\- Right now I'm not doing anything; sometimes I fish.

\- So you're a fisherman?

\- If you want to call it that.

\- Why aren't you fishing now?

\- As I'm sure you'd put it, I have reached my daily quota.

\- What's your quota?

\- One fish a day. At most. Some days I don't catch any.

\- One. Fish. A. Day?? You can't make a living with one fish per day! Where do
you even go to sell just one fish??!?

\- I don't sell it. I eat it.

The businessman stays silent for a while, watching the man watching the sea.
Then he says

\- Listen, I'm a businessman. Don't you want to hear some advice about how to
grow your business?

\- Shoot.

\- First, you should make it your goal to catch as much fish as possible,
every day. There must be a market somewhere on this island where you could
sell it?

\- There is. 2 miles from here.

\- Okay, great. You catch a lot of fish, you walk to the market, you sell the
fish, keeping some for your own consumption if you wish.

\- And then?

\- And then, with the money you buy a net. A net will let you catch so much
more fish at once.

\- And then?

\- And then you catch more fish, you sell more fish, you make more money. With
the money, you can buy a better boat.

\- Better in what sense?

\- Bigger, nicer -- better looking! And with that boat you'll be able to catch
even more fish.

\- Oh. And then what?

\- Then you make even more money, and you can save it.

\- Save it?

\- After your expenses are paid, you keep the extra money; after a while
you'll have lots of money.

\- And what do I do with that money?

\- Once you have enough money, you'll be able to retire! You won't have to
work anymore!

Now it's time for the fisherman to think. He stares at his feet for a while
and says

\- But I'm not working right now.

~~~
anilgulecha
Wasn't there a fable posted to HN which continued this story -- about how the
businessman found the fisherman's neighbour to serve the market?

~~~
johnchristopher
I don't know why you are being down-voted.

Here's a follow-up and slightly different take on that story:
[http://blog.figuringshitout.com/the-parable-of-the-
fisherman...](http://blog.figuringshitout.com/the-parable-of-the-fisherman/)

Here's an HN discussion about it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602351)

------
edanm
This is getting a lot of negative reactions. If this causes cperciva not to
listen to this post, it will be a Big Tragedy.

A lot of people here are ~saying "maybe cperciva isn't motivated by money".
OK. I get that.

Here's the thing - I honestly believe that Tarsnap is the best backup
solution. I believe this because I hang around HN, I'm a technologist, and I
trust tptacek and patio11, among others, when they say it.

I am right on the edge of someone who would actually use Tarsnap - I'm a geek,
but I also run a business, the money it would cost me is less than peanuts (if
I could figure out how much it would cost me, that is - see the article). I'm
probably not going to use Tarsnap because of a few missing but critical
features that patio11 mentioned, like auto-recharging money (do I _really_
need another bullet on my todo list, or to worry about my backups
disappearing?).

But there's a whole world of people out there. People who could _really,
really_ use Tarsnap. People who have _my user data_ on their systems, and who
_I wish_ would use a service as good as Tarsnap. These people will never, ever
use Tarsnap, because of all the reasons patio11 mentioned, and because they
will never hear of it or _know_ that it's better than everything else.

What I said above has nothing to do with moral philosophy. It is a _fact about
the world_ that, if cperciva doesn't play the "marketing game" (or the "make
your software useable by normal people" game), less people will use Tarsnap.

And the world will be worse off. Is this a tragedy? Sure. cperciva doesn't
_owe_ the world or anyone in it anything. It isn't a _moral absolute_ that
giving cperciva more resources, to make Tarsnap that much better, is the right
thing to happen.

But I _hate_ to see a whole forum full of people who actually think that what
cperciva is doing is somehow more "noble" and less "greedy" because he doesn't
care about money. *

* I have no problem with cperciva acting however he wants in this regard, and absolutely do not mean any disrespect. I honestly don't think cperciva owes anyone anything. But I _do_ think that it's an empirical fact that the world will be worse off for less people having used a good backup solution, and I honestly believe that living ina world with more people using Tarsnap, and incidentally cperciva having more money, is a _better world_. If you really want - donate all that money to GiveWell, and the world will be even _better_ off.

~~~
opendais
Would you agree the best solution is for cperciva to start a second brand that
is purely B2B and more in line with the blog post?

I think the negative reactions stem more from an attraction to the Tarsnap
brand as a G2G service combined with cperciva's cavalier attitude toward's
increasing his income by charging his customers more. Regardless of patio11's
thoughts, the current 'brand' would take a hit by losing the 'geek to geek'
luster.

The OP maintains two separate brands for separate products. Maintaining a
'premium B2B' brand for Tarsnap would bypass any negative reaction, I think.

I'm not sure why the majority of the people [OP included] think a single B2B
or G2G brand is the 'best option'.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
I think a single brand is a better option in this case because it greatly
reduces scope, and seeing as it's a one man business scope is the biggest
enemy there is. But also because I don't see it as a black and white decision
about whether to appeal to geeks or enterprises.

I think patio11 went too far towards the "only appealing to non-geeks" end of
the spectrum, partly because he just wanted to show how big of a spectrum
there is. It's absolutely possible to have a optimized pricing system, and a
well-designed (not talking just visuals) homepage without being anti-geek. For
evidence of that just look at Stripe or GitHub. It actually seems like an
incredibly rewarding task if cperciva finds the right geek-oriented designer.

~~~
edanm
Github is the _perfect_ example. Very "pro-geek". But can you imagine if they
had appealed to only people who are comfortable with the command-line and with
no GUI's? Github is in many ways just a nice GUI and good documentation on top
of git, making it more accessible for the average programmer.

And does anyone honestly think the world would be better if git was less
widespread?

~~~
opendais
Perhaps I'm just strange but I wouldn't pay for GitHub and I am the reason
that we went with GitLab at $DAY_JOB since its my responsibility to maintain
everything Git.

The majority of my coworkers are GitHub's target audience [programmers that do
not really want to truly understand how Git works] and they have no active
desire to use GitHub. I'm literally the only person that works here with a
GitHub account which I barely use because I run a private instance of GitLab
instead.

So, while it is a perfect 'mainstream' example, in your eyes...it is also a
prime example that there is a significant market that wouldn't use GitHub
professionally.

~~~
simonw
Just out of interest, why do you think GitHub's target audience are developers
who don't want to truly understand git?

~~~
recursive
I'm one of them. For me it's because I made some token efforts before to
understand it, and it seemed far more complicated than source control should
be. I have very simple needs, and correspondingly don't really have a desire
to learn non simple tools.

~~~
opendais
And if that works for you, you shouldn't learn it. :)

But I think Tarsnap -> Patio11's Idea is like Git -> GitHub. I think there are
two separate audiences there with different needs.

------
aresant
The negative reaction to Patrick's design template is so meta.

It completely proves his point the power of "wrong" design.

Everybody forgot all the brilliant things Patrick said because they didn't
like the design.

And that's his point!

Send a non-technical guy who's ass is truly on the line to Tarsnap and, sorry,
he's going to have a negative "blink" gut reaction.

If you've ever built a SAAS to any scale, you'll know that is true. Sad. But
100% accurate.

Stripe's original UX to me was a better example of where Tarsnap could go (vs.
even the current stripe site):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20111007130738/https://stripe.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111007130738/https://stripe.com/)

Headline, button, 5 relevant "benefits"

Then a link to start, documentation, and get help.

Almost exactly what Patrick illustrates before he loses us with a rushed
design.

------
mcherm
Instead of a critique of how Tarsnap is run, this sounds like a business
proposal for a company that would offer B2B services using Tarsnap as a back-
end.

They could do things like offering a flat $100 rate for what is probably $2.60
of services and then roll around in the money. Or donate some of it to Tarsnap
so it will keep running.

Hmm... in many ways, it's actually not a bad idea. Especially if you
_partnered_ with Tarsnap so you could effectively do referrals to each other:
send the geeks to bare-bones Tarsnap and they'd send the PHBs to you.

~~~
arohner
Yes. I'd pay money for an OSX UI to backup my laptop.

~~~
jamie_ca
OSX UI to backup your laptop, encrypted, to AWS: www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

I don't know tarsnap well enough to compare encryption models with Arq or
anything, but I'm not invested enough to dig into it either. Arq works for me
as a customer, and I'm not really in the tarsnap market.

------
rsync
As someone who knows a little something about this business, and who has been
excited and enthusiastic about tarsnap from day one, I hope Colin pays no
attention to what you have written and continues to provide his service (note,
I didn't say "run his business") just as he has.

I want to live in a world where tarsnap is sold for picodollars.

~~~
phillmv
Well, I hope he changes the "auto deleted if you don't check your email for 14
days" and just _charges my credit card accordingly_. Operating on pre-payment
is kind of nutty.

~~~
dalke
The "truly paranoid" would check backup status email more than once every
fortnight. ;)

~~~
kybernetyk
What happens if I get in an accident and get in a coma for longer than 14
days? What if I get arrested? What if I go on my honeymoon and simply forget
about the backup? What if ... truly paranoid people are paranoid about that
possibility, too.

I know I am and that this 14 days clause is the only reason why I am not using
tarsnap.

~~~
dalke
"What-if"s are fun! (Still operating under the ";)" from earlier.)

What if auto-renew were added, but you're robbed and knocked into a coma for 2
months. In the meanwhile, the credit card company notices the suspicious
transactions, can't get a hold of you, and cancels the card. Auto-renew occurs
3 days later, but the card number on file doesn't work. Colin Percival calls
your phone number, and gets no answer for a month. Then what?

If you're truly paranoid, you might have to consider that possibility as well.

With every scenario and solution you can come up with which require
intervention, I can double down on and think of a worse-case scenario where
your solution won't work and you'll lose your data. A possible non-
intervention solution could work, which is to front-load the account to the
limits of your paranoia.

~~~
freebs
What if the payments were taken out of an account automatically and you could
load up a reserve with money. This would allow for calculations on your
usage:money without it being a major factor on immediate loss of service.

------
kruipen
What patio11 doesn't get, is that part of the reason why HN crowd considers
tarsnap "the best backup software" is exactly because Colin Percival is what
patio11 calls "bad at business" (and what I would call "motivated not only by
money").

BTW, that is the same reason for the backlash over Oculus acquisition: people
are upset that it will no longer be run by "bad at business" engineers like
John Carmack, but instead by "very good at business" Mark Zuckerberg.

~~~
tptacek
HN is wrong about why Tarsnap is the best backup software, and that's partly
because Colin is falsely modest about what Tarsnap is. Tarsnap is the best
backup software because it is the most technically credible secure backup
service on the Internet.

One way you can gauge just how wrong HN is about this point is to compare
Tarsnap's business to that of any well-known backup provider, virtually all of
which could (presuming, perhaps unfairly, that Colin is rational) buy Tarsnap
with pocket change.

Backup is a huge business, and enterprise/business backup is an especially
lucrative segment of that business. Colin has the most technically credible
offering for that segment. But he captures only a tiny fraction of it, and
regularly finds himself on HN explaining to HN people why Tarsnap costs so
much given how cheap AWS storage is. Q.E.D.

~~~
cpach
It’s kind of amazing that some people here believe its modest price to be
Tarsnap’s main value proposition.

~~~
patio11
This sort of misunderstanding is encouraged by using one's limited supply of
the customer's time and attention to highlight "picodollars" as opposed to
"Considering online backups? You get to choose between a) you can retrieve
your backups, b) other people can't retrieve your backups, c) a and b, but
only if you won the Putnam."

------
jcampbell1
If you run a high margin SaaS business where much of the technology is open
source, you are going to get cloned. Once you get cloned, you can be crushed
by people much better at marketing and sales.

If you stick to low margin / cost plus pricing, it effectively poisons the
well for your competitors.

The "poison the well" strategy has worked very well for Craigslist, and the
Siracha hot sauce guy.

I'd do everything patrick suggested, but stick to the cost plus pricing and
not worry about extracting consumer surplus for the value you create.

Once you have a $500/month enterprise plan that is popular, you are going to
have competitors that offer more for $400/month, and VC's will be plowing them
with money to hire salespeople to go after these $40,000 LTV customers. All
the sudden, your product will no longer be the best solution for your own
customers.

~~~
ForHackernews
I like how you present Craigslist as "poisoning the well" for other business
rather than "providing maximum value for consumers".

I wish all businesses operated on tiny margins. That's how capitalism is
supposed to work: competition eats up surplus.

~~~
jcampbell1
You are right, the two things are just different sides of the same coin.

Jeff Bezos and Craig Newmark are both "providing maximum value" and "poisoning
the well of competitors". I'd say both ended up in the same place yet have
completely different business philosophies.

When discussing the merits of different pricing strategies, it is best if the
argument stands without being clouded by notions of altruism.

------
w1ntermute
I'm reminded of this post by lionhearted: [http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-
genius-and-tragedy-of-patri...](http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-
tragedy-of-patrick-mckenzie)

~~~
tptacek
That would be a more apt comparison if this blog post hadn't been part of an
ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of
which HN is aware of.

~~~
enko
> an ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of
> which HN is aware of

The knowledge that there's missing context, which was provided in some sort of
back room inside-baseball hn-elites secret discussion to which I was not a
party and will never be granted access, kind of makes me wish the article had
never been posted in the first place.

"Here's my article - which you'll never understand, because you weren't there,
because you're not cool enough". Great.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Oh FFS, there's enough good info in the article to just think about _that_ ,
without getting all butt-hurt about in-groups and out-groups.

------
dewey
I'm still reading and just looking at the screenshots and I have to say I very
much prefer the Tarsnap design not the cheap template one which doesn't really
look very trustworthy to me and is probably more suited for an online
pharmacy.

~~~
TeeWEE
Coudn't agree more. The current design of tarsnap is much better. It shows
that tarsnap is serious about technology and security.

~~~
nandemo
So Patrick says in so many words that

 _" Customers like typical HNers might like Tarsnap the way it is, but Colin
should instead market to [such and such businesses] using [lots of specific
and actionable advice] because [lots of reasons explained in excruciating
detail]"._

HNers:

 _" Oh, I like Tarsnap the way it is."_

~~~
nwienert
Doesn't change the fact that his redesign looks identical to the 100 generic
free wordpress themes you see on lots of non-technical and spammy sites around
the web.

Colin could spend one day and come up with something that didn't look super
generic. My idea would be something dark and simple, like this:
[https://useiconic.com/](https://useiconic.com/)

~~~
mcherm
Patrick's actual advice was: "Here’s what I’d tell a contract designer hired
to re-do the Tarsnap CSS and HTML [...] a visual redesign will probably cost
Colin four to low five figures."

Then he supplemented this with: " let’s hypothetically assume it isn’t in the
budget. In that case, we go to Themeforest and buy any SaaS template which
isn’t totally hideous."

So don't complain that it looks identical to 100 generic free wordpress themes
-- that was Patrick's point, and his actual advice was exactly what you call
for: spending a day to come up with something.

------
rglullis
Sigh... why does everything needs to be focused on the "Enterprise", the
"suits with the checks"? I want to get to this post-scarcity world everyone
keeps talking about, but we will never get there if we treat every product as
something that must extract "consumer surplus" and be "defensible from
competition".

I feel like we should strive to _destroy_ the enterprise, not enable it. I am
sure that Patrick's approach would be more profitable, but how many people
would be put off by this "professional-oriented" position? Yeah, I'm the guy
who would rather go through the trouble of installing/maintaining my own
GitLab server than paying a dime to Github/Bitbucket. It doesn't make sense
economically? I don't give a shit. I feel like there must be _something_ in
this life that I should be able to do by myself. I will give as much time
needed to someone who needs help to install/setup Ubuntu on their laptops, but
to hell with them if they ask for help to setup their printer on Windows or
Mac.

Also, I know that Colin gave the go-ahead to write this piece, but reading the
thing it amazed me how it works only as a way to push Patrick's agenda, but
none of Colin's. The template that it took only 20 minutes to put together?
Put it on a git repo and make it public domain, let other people build upon
it. Tell people that those who are genuinely focused on tarsnap success that
they can contribute, and even educate other users. This piece works only to
show that Patrick can tell people what they should do, but there is nothing
Patrick has done to _actively improve things_.

~~~
jason_tko
What better way to destroy the enterprise, as you put it, than taking their
money.

And it's less about 'catering to the enterprise', and more about doing
business on your own terms.

>>Yeah, I'm the guy who would rather go through the trouble of
installing/maintaining my own GitLab server than paying a dime to
Github/Bitbucket.

Then please note you're not really suited to participate in a discussion about
optimally pricing SaaS to businesses. It will be painful for you, and the
people involved.

>>it amazed me how it works only as a way to push Patrick's agenda, but none
of Colin's.

Patrick and Colin are friends. Patrick wrote this post to help a friend.
Patrick's agenda is Colin's success.

>>there is nothing Patrick has done to actively improve things

Patrick has spent hours thinking about and distilling his thinking into a blog
post, designed to help Colin. Patrick is regularly paid Large Sums of Money
for his experience and capability in this exact, specific area. What should
Patrick have done? Fly from Japan to where Colin lives, push him aside, and
implement all the work he suggested, against Colin's will?

~~~
rglullis
Oh, come on. "Taking their money" would never destroy them. As Patrick loves
to say, this is peanuts to most company budgets. Also, by focusing on
enterprise needs instead of normal folk, you end up with an offering that is
designed for the enterprise, which automatically pushes out the smaller fish.

> Patrick's agenda is Colin's success.

Sorry, but this is bullshit. Read the blog post again. I would doubt very much
that Colin feels like Tarsnap is a failure of some kind - quite the opposite.
Patrick's agenda is keeping the idea that what he does is worth "Large Sums of
Money". This might work with the marketing people, but it disappoints me to no
end to see this becoming the prevailing view of "Hacker News".

> What should Patrick have done?

A much shorter blog post:

"Do you know Tarsnap? It's this amazing backup solution, created and run by
Colin Percival. I wished I could tell everyone to use, but I understand that
most people get put off by it's lack of marketing polish. This is
understandable if you know that Colin is a genius who (like most other
geniuses) do not realize how things that seem simple to him might be harder
for the common folk.

I am not such a genius, so I can not contribute to tarsnap itself. But I can
contribute to ancillary things that Colin is too smart to even bother doing.
So I put together this website ([http://link_to_repo](http://link_to_repo))
and also this wiki ([http://link_to_wiki](http://link_to_wiki)) where people
can discuss things and/or come together to improve the product in ways they
think it's relevant. This way we can have Colin doing the things he is already
happy doing at a such an affordable price, we can get rid of these small
annoyances and get to have more arguments to convince Grandma to use Tarsnap.
Most importantly, everyone can be sure that Tarsnap will be around for a much
longer time. "

Now, _this_ would be pushing Colin's agenda. This would be allowing Colin to
do business on his own terms. Patrick's post just reads as a self-marketing
piece.

~~~
jason_tko
>> you end up with an offering that is designed for the enterprise, which
automatically pushes out the smaller fish.

Can you think of a utility or service that serves the needs of a wide range of
businesses, from freelancers all the way up to enterprise? Electricity?
Github? Dropbox? Internet connectivity? These services have found ways to
charge all businesses of all sizes appropriately at fair rates, without
"pushing out smaller fish".

>> I would doubt very much that Colin feels like Tarsnap is a failure of some
kind - quite the opposite.

Much like the opposite of love is not hate (it's apathy), the opposite of
success is not always failure (it's flat-lining). Growth keeps living things
alive, including businesses. Patrick's suggestions are a bunch of ideas
focused on helping Tarsnap grow.

>> Patrick's agenda is keeping the idea that what he does is worth "Large Sums
of Money".

I do not know a better method to value something that is worth "Large Sums of
Money" than people paying "Large Sums of Money" for it. In fact, that is the
very definition of value. This is not limited to marketing people. It is the
definition of a 'market'. Patrick has a track record of people paying large
sums of money for his services, when he was actively consulting.

>> A much shorter blog post: "Do you know Tarsnap? It's this amazing backup
solution, created and run by Colin Percival."

Lets imagine you have the experience and ability to 10x or 100x software
companies, as Patrick does. When Patrick looks at Tarsnap, he sees a series of
simple, straightforward actions that could 10x or 100x it, that does not
necessarily require any more work than what Colin is currently doing. With
that in mind, it would be impossible for Patrick to credibly and authentically
write that kind of boring-ass sales-shill blog post, that would have reached a
tiny audience of disinterested people.

>> This would be allowing Colin to do business on his own terms.

Colin is fully free and allowed to do business on his own terms. Patrick is
also free and allowed to have and express opinions on how Colin does business.
In fact, Patrick even received Colin's consent to write that blog post.

>>Patrick's post just reads as a self-marketing piece.

Having known Patrick for years, and considering him a close friend, this is
the furthest statement from the truth I have read on the internet. At least,
since I last reloaded the comment thread on this post.

~~~
rglullis
Seems like we are in very different mindsets when discussing the whole thing.

First of all, I do not share the idea that growth is the only to measure
success. In fact I strongly disagree with it. Colin's idea of success could as
well be "What is the state of art when it comes to secure backup software?
When Tarsnap is the answer, that will be considered a success".

Second, you seem to be too hung up on the idea of keeping the business alive.
I was semi-serious when I was talking about the post-scarcity world. In my
ideal world, Colin would be out of work, _just like me and everyone else_. I
_want_ secure-backups to be a commodity infinitely cheap, not something that I
may get for free only if someone else is subsidizing some artificially larger
cost. I want Colin to work on things he cares about, out of his own personal
interest, not for this SV fucked up measure of success.

Third, I know my blog post is boring. That would be the whole point, actually.
Don't forget we are talking about fucking BACKUPS here. They are not supposed
to be exciting or deserve all this ink we are spilling over it. The point what
I am trying to make is that, what I would see as an actual contribution worth
of praise (and even value) would be if Patrick went through the boring parts
and muck and said "Hey Colin, I know this is now what you want to focus on,
but it's important as an user of the product, so here you go."

Was that we got? No. What we got was some blog post from someone "highly
trusted in the community", which works only to establish that he "knows what
he is talking about". And yes, there are people willing to pay large amounts
of cash for this. I wouldn't, and it disappoints me that so many people here
do.

Lastly, this is not an attack on Patrick, but rather on this mentality that is
so widespread and so exposed on the blog post.

------
avenger123
First of all Epic post from patio11. Lots of great advice that can be used by
others.

I think the main thing is that all the things that Patrick is mentioning is
overhead that Colin likely doesn't want.

He's running this as a lifestyle business and not a company that wants to make
millions. I agree that certain changes can be made that allow better value for
users (the auto-payment ability being very important) but all these things add
overhead that Colin doesn't seem to want. Each change has a multiplier of
time, and extra stress.

Heck, he doesn't want to waste his time on fixing his logo to be sharper.

I find Colin's approach refreshing. It's rare to see someone (especially one
so gifted intellectually) be so in tune with what they want out of life.
Having freedom to do what he wants, enough money to enjoy life and save for
retirement and providing an important contribution to the world is what
Tarsnap provides.

I'm sure Colin will make changes to make it more useful but I think it will be
in the context of what's the best for the users and not what's the best for
his pocket.

------
christiangenco
This post just converted me to use Tarsnap for five servers worth of backups.

I've encountered Tarsnap half a dozen times over the last ~two years, but I
was always thrown off by something ("what is this?", "backblaze is easier to
use", "that pricing model is way too high - I'd be paying over a thousand
dollars a year", etc.). Patrick's post systematically affirmed that I have a
clear and pressing need for this, that it's severely underpriced, and a clear
path of implementation.

~~~
jws
Over lunch I mentioned tarsnap's hit by bus plan to the honchos of a seven
figure/year business that needs secure offsite backups. They had a good laugh
and dismissed tarsnap completely.

For my own needs I can't use it because I can't tolerate the casual backup
obliteration policy.

The message I got out of patio11's work was that there are show stopping
issues that are not fundamental to excellence of the product. Lose them. Help
more people.

Bill me monthly. Don't obliterate the backups I'm counting on. You can have my
business, my recommendations, and my thanks.

(And by all means he should, get a person or a service to take care of all
that billing nuisance. Don't let it bring him down. I contract people to
collect the money I don't enjoy collecting. That person needs a job too.)

~~~
christiangenco
Perhaps, then, there's much more room for services like this that are more
established with a better UX at a higher price point.

------
kryptiskt
The biggest fault with this is the assumption that the geek market isn't big
enough to do serious business in. I wouldn't alienate existing customers by an
enterprisey makeover.

Even when it comes to B2B, it is better for a service like this to get into
enterprise via their geeks than try to appeal to their suits, because
Tarsnap's strengths mean nothing to a suit.

~~~
solutionyogi
How about serving both geek market and B2B market? As Patrick noted, Tarsnap
Basic will still exist for all geeks to pay pico dollars by usage.

I do consulting for hedge funds in NYC. Most of them use an accounting system
called 'Advent Geneva'. This particular software solution has a Unix component
where the actual accounting data lives. My clients would like to back up this
database securely and reliably. Security is extremely important as for a given
hedge fund, their trades and positions are extremely sensitive information.
Tarsnap is exactly the backup solution these clients would want to use. As a
consultant, I don't think I will ever be able to sell Tarsnap in its existing
form to these clients. Keeping aside pricing, these clients would want an SLA
(and other legal stuff mentioned in the article) for the backup service. These
clients are more than willing to pay costs associated with this higher level
of service and will benefit tremendously from using Tarsnap.

I do not know any backup solution which is better than Tarsnap and it's unfair
that businesses will have to use less-than-ideal technical solutions ONLY
BECAUSE Colin doesn't want to adjust 'business side' of his product offering.

~~~
smacktoward
Or just sell the same product through two different channels. Call it
"Tarsnap" and make it work via a CLI and low-fi Web site for the geeks who
appreciate such things, and call it "Super Secure Backup Pro XP" (or whatever
name appeals to normals) with a GUI and a lickable Web site for the non-geek
population.

Underneath it can all be the same product, just packaged differently depending
on who the potential customer is.

~~~
lsc
>Or just sell the same product through two different channels. Call it
"Tarsnap" and make it work via a CLI and low-fi Web site for the geeks who
appreciate such things, and call it "Super Secure Backup Pro XP" (or whatever
name appeals to normals) with a GUI and a lickable Web site for the non-geek
population.

See, this is something I have thought a lot about. I can understand the value
of the 'enterprise' pricing tiers (and yeah, if I have to do a bunch of
paperwork, it's totally fair for me to charge you more.) So I can see where
pricing tiers could be a good thing.

However... the bit I'm questioning here is how far you distance your
'enterprise' product from your 'geek' product- Especially if you have a strong
'geek' following already, I would argue that you don't want to start over in
the 'enterprise' space. You want to carry over the name. Either, as Patrick
suggested, move the 'geek' product to a less-accessible URL and
professionalize your primary brand, or build a "tarsnap enterprise business
edition" url.

Either way, there is a whole lot of value in a brand valued by nerds. I agree
that brand needs to change some (and the product needs to change more) to be
marketable to the enterprise, but... the boss basically respects his or her
geeks... enough to pay them a lot of money. Sometimes I even find the business
folks emulating the geeks when dealing with computers. A MBA where I worked
saw how paranoid I was about ESD and asked for one of my wrist straps. He used
it while he was typing emails on his mac. The "business edition" of the thing
his geeks say is awesome is going to have a lot more pull than just some
random new brand.

~~~
smacktoward
But how much does "Tarsnap" as a brand buy you in the enterprise space,
really? Enterprise buyers won't get what it means -- to them "tar" is sticky
black goop, not an archiving format. That by itself is no big deal -- if you
spend enough, you can get people to remember anything -- but there's no
evidence that Tarsnap has that kind of "brand awareness" among that crowd, is
there?

I normally would agree, don't throw away a perfectly good brand if you can
avoid it. But if the customer has never heard of your brand, and wouldn't
understand it if they _did_ hear of it, that's one of the few cases where
coming up with a new one could make sense.

~~~
lsc
>But if the customer has never heard of your brand,

If they've never heard of the brand, you are right. A good name that your
customer hasn't heard is better than a bad name your customer hasn't heard.

But, my belief is that there are a lot of semi-technical "enterprise" or at
least "SMB" types on places like hacker news, who likely have heard of
tarsnap. And even if not, as I said, management listens to their technical
help, often more closely than it seems.

Hell, I've had a few 'enterprise' type companies coming to me, by
recommendation of their technical folks. The deal usually falls through
because I am not equipped to deal with that sort of thing, but the opportunity
was there, because a non-management technical person knew my name. Colin is
way closer to being able to support those sorts of customers than I am, and I
think he has a much larger technical userbase than I do, too.

>and wouldn't understand it if they did hear of it

I'm a firm believer that how recognized your name is matters a whole lot more
than how "good" or "meaningful" your name is. A bad name that your customer
has heard before is worth a lot more than a good name that your customer has
not heard of.

What does conviva mean? what does akamai mean? Avocent? Cisco? To your average
English-speaking monoglot, these are just random strings of letters. Much like
'tarsnap' is a random string of letters to people who aren't crusty sysadmins.
The names of companies gain meaning through use.

------
acabal
Hit the nail on the head with the pricing model. I really want a backup
solution like Tarsnap that encrypts my data client-side and has an OSS client.
I'm even fine with it being a Unixy command-line tool. But I have almost 1TB--
a lifetime, so far--of pictures and music that I want backed up. I have
literally no idea how much that would cost with Tarsnap, and it could be as
high as hundreds per month. There's no way to find out until the bill comes.
So I'm just not going to bother.

If cperciva wants to keep metered pricing, maybe offering a free 3-day trial
or something so users can get an idea of how much their particular backup
situation would cost before committing would be a good idea.

~~~
e12e
If you have ~1TB of free space, just create a regular tar archive of your data
and compress it -- maybe factor in another 10% for dedup (as seen anecdotally
by others with large image collections -- this assumes you have raw
images+jpegs -- for just jpegs, maybe nothing). Should be (bounded by) 500 USD
first month (storage and upload), and 250 USD/Month after that (and ~250 USD
to restore).

I'm not sure what's difficult with these calculations?

The dedup (as I understand it) is mostly relevant for incremental backups
"adding up" \-- so that you can (mostly) run weekly backups without worrying
too much about storage cost ballooning out of control.

Note: I'm not affiliated with tarsnap, nor am I a customer -- partly because
I'm in a similar position: The data (emails etc) that I can afford to backup
in a similar fashion to tarsnap (I use backupninja as a front-end for
duplicity) is almost trivial to backup -- the rest (photos, media) I cannot
currently afford to backup to the cloud (nor do I have the upstream bandwidth
for it).

~~~
beagle3
I am not sure how tarsnap dedups, but you could use apenwarr's amazing "bup"
to create a dedupped, compressed backup and get a good idea of the size. But
at those prices ...

An external, USB powered, 5400RPM 1TB drive can be bought for $60 last I
checked. An online backup service is nice to have, but for $250/month, you
could buy a new 1TB disk every week, format it with TrueCrypt, copy your stuff
to it, and email it to a random acquaintance/family member (or a known wrong
address in Hawaii, so it comes back to you with "wrong address" a few weeks
later). It's not as convenient as tarsnap, but way more resilient, not to
mention that downloading 1TB back is going to take more than mailing the disk
back to you -- or in most cases, taking a return flight to retrieve the disk
yourself.

~~~
e12e
> It's not as convenient as tarsnap, but way more resilient

I'm not so sure about that. In either case loosing your encryption keys is a
single point of failure, but tarsnap is backed by regular s3, so it should
take a pretty cataclysmic event for the data to disappear -- contrast that
with dropping your hd 1 meter and loosing the data.

I don't expect to have a hopelessly slow and asymmetrical 10-20/1-2 mbs
Internet connection forever, so at some point personal backup to the cloud is
likely to become more viable (technically I could get ~gps upload at my
university right now). The only remaining obstacle would be price -- and while
backing up servers via tarsnap sounds great, if all you want is off-site ~1TB
storage _with the bandwidth to use it_ you could just get a dedicated server
somewhere. Not as redundant, but assuming you have on-site backup on disk, and
a live copy on your server, you'd have to be pretty unlucky to loose any data.

FWIW I don't think tarsnap aims to be a personal backup solution (for
multimedia) -- and for now neither is S3/glacier. If it were, there'd be no
reason for Backblaze to have their storage pods.

~~~
beagle3
> contrast that with dropping your hd 1 meter and loosing the data.

Note that tarsnap prices are comparable to 1 new drive per week. After a year,
you'll have 52 fully independent snapshots. If the 4 latest ones fall from 1m
height, you still have 48 copies (losing most recent month, but having access
to all of last year).

And it doesn't take a cataclysmic event - if Colin can't pay amazon e.g.
Because the Canadian FBI might have a gag order instructing him to back door
he service ... Or else ... I know he can't, but I am not sure that will stop
them from disrupting the service. Same goes for any cloud backup, by the way.

------
steveklabnik
> the intersection of Catholic teaching on social justice and SaaS pricing
> grids,

Maybe it's just me, but I would read the _hell_ out of that blog post.

------
Nanzikambe
Interesting article. I'd actually not heard of Tarsnap before, one question
(to those who use it), why would a geek use it over:

    
    
      tar -cf - / --exclude='/proc/*' --exclude='/dev/*' [..] | \
          xz -z | \
          openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -salt | \
          > /mnt/your/networked/google/drive/backup.$(hostname -a).$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").aes.tar.xz
    

I spent a while going through
[https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/) and I didn't find any
flexibility tarsnap offers over it. To make it work unattended, it's trivial
to generate a unique key per backup for openssl (use a tmpfs) and then gpg
encrypt the key and email it to sys admins or whatever mailing list before
killing the tmpfs.

I could understand the appeal to less tech savvy users if there were a gui, or
it featured cross platform support beyond those supported by tar, <insert
compression tool>, openssl/aespipe/gpg/<insert encryption tool>, or the
storage was super cheap.

So what's the value proposition here?

~~~
tomp
Data deduplication, incremental backups.

~~~
Nanzikambe
Heh apologies, my fault for trying to be clever, the mechanism I actually use
is incremental and deduplicated. I substituted it for tar to simplify.

I actually use ZFS (filesystem), so my backup flow is closer to:

    
    
      TSTAMP="backup-$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")"
      zfs snapshot -r $TSTAMP
      zfs send $TSTAMP | \
          xz -z | \
          openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -salt | \
          > /mnt/your/networked/google/drive/backup.$(hostname -a).$TSTAMP.aes.tar.xz
    

The underyling ZFS filesystem is deduplicated at filesystem level, and
snapshots are incremental. THere're a few other minor differences (the dest is
another ZFS host which syncs to Google drive, and I nuke the local snapshot
after send because RAID 1+0 space is more expensive than RAID1 .. )

~~~
Nanzikambe
To answer my own question: deduplication :)

I had not considered multiple backup sources, mine is deduplicated per host,
am I to understand tarsnap is deduplicated across all hosts sharing a set of
keys?

~~~
vbit
Also, easier restore and snapshot deletion.

Consider how you would restore using incremental ZFS snapshots. You'd have to
pull all the snaphots, unpack the base snapshot and then sequentially unpack
each incremental snapshot.

In tarsnap, the server will compute the 'snapshot' you want for you, and will
only send you the data blocks that belong to that snapshot.

In tarsnap, you can also delete any snapshot you want, and only blocks
belonging exclusively to that snapshot will be deleted. In your system,
deleting a snapshot means you lose all snapshots from that one until the next
full snapshot.

Also, in ZFS you're limited to backing up complete datasets, but with tarsnap
you can backup any set of files you want.

------
grannyg00se
Or...How I would run an online backup service completely unrelated to Tarsnap,
with different goals, different priorities, and different ideals.

~~~
Zikes
Honestly, he's put so much thought and effort into it already and seems to
care a lot about it, I wonder why he doesn't just launch a competing service.

Edit: Whoa, lots of downvotes. I guess it is a bit odd to ask a person who
just said "What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap" if they have any literal interest
in running Tarsnap. Silly me.

~~~
patio11
Because being on the hook for people's backups is not my idea of a fun time,
because I'd be directly competing with an Internet buddy who I'd rather see
successful, because I have no particular comparative advantage in backups that
I don't have in a host of better product categories, because I already run
three businesses and enjoy sleeping occasionally, because running services is
in fact a heck of a lot harder than posting about them, etc etc.

~~~
jacquesm
You are assuming that Colin did not make a number of different (but similar in
spirit) decisions when he set up tarsnap the way he did.

But if you espouse like this on 'what you would do if you ran tarsnap' then
you probably should be doing just that, rather than to list your own set of
priorities that contradict the whole premise of your well intentioned public
good advice.

I read this as a public offer to do better, excuses about how you're too busy
shouldn't count. If you're going to tell someone how you would run their
business you should be wiling to do exactly that. Otherwise your words lose a
lot of strength.

 _Especially_ because running services is a lot harder than (publicly) posting
about them.

~~~
rwallace
I read the article as an immensely valuable 'Business 101 For Geeks: With
Current Case Study' tutorial, and wished I had more than one upvote to give
it. Seriously, people pay good money for educational material of far lower
quality, and we're getting it free. Demanding that the author take on another
business is... an inappropriate response.

~~~
thenomad
Indeed. I have paid and will continue to happily pay significant sums of money
for educational material at approximately this detail level, so I'm very very
happy that Patrick is willing to do it for free.

------
nemothekid
Wow, this was a very interesting read and if forget all the minor changes like
the site design his argument cracks open an argument against the way Tarsnap
is run. Forget all silicon valley, photo sharing, selling coffee to
20-somethings startups, it seems to me Tarsnap is running inside its own
Silicon Valley bubble.

The argument here is Tarsnap is a great product but the way its being sold
actively discriminates those who would be best served by their offering, but
are not run by unix wizards, and I think we should all care about this issue
as well. If it means a company like Target is easily convinced to use a
solution like Tarsnap, instead of a competitors, or worse, rolling their own -
I think we would be all much better off.

With a great tool like Tarsnap, no matter how its priced, or how its sold, or
what CSS is loaded - it should be clear that it provides a great value add and
most people are better off with Tarsnap's solution in an enterprise setting.
We shouldn't forget its incredibly easy to say "Well things are great now"
when they are only great for you.

------
flavor8
> "Colin is in no danger of selling Tarsnap to people with multiple terabyte
> databases — there’s only a few dozen of those organizations in the world and
> they would not even bring up Tarsnap to joke about it."

...is not actually true. There are likely thousands of companies with multi TB
databases, many of which are small shops who need a backup solution. S3 is one
option of course...

~~~
wglb
A company I know of and do business with produces software for firms in which
a terabyte is considered a small installation. Many firms use this software.

~~~
patio11
I stand corrected. Would love to hear more next time we're in the same room.

~~~
wglb
Yes, and it is actually that kind of conversation. I will email you about some
thoughts on a different topic, and you will recognize my email from my
profile.

------
thaumaturgy
I've gotta agree with just about everything Patrick said there, despite being
inclined more towards Colin's way of doing things.

For the last several years I've been running a business whose primary purpose,
really, is charity: providing high quality technical services to people and
businesses who couldn't otherwise afford them.

It sounds like a noble cause, but it sucks balls.

You're not serving your customers' needs if you end up in the hospital for any
of a hundred different reasons that can happen to anyone at any time, and
there's nobody that can manage the service for you while you're out. (Look:
you obviously think that having a backup plan for data is important; why do
you not think that having a _business backup plan_ is also important?)

You're not serving your customers' needs if you can't afford to ensure the
integrity of your own infrastructure. No business lasts forever; what happens
if Amazon, two years from now, starts making policy decisions that cripple
your business? Steve Jobs died just over two years ago and most people agree
by now that Apple has become a different company. Bezos is not immortal, and
there's a board of directors that would very much like to be making a lot more
money from Amazon.

You're not serving your customers' needs by maintaining an unnecessarily high
barrier to doing business with you. I do web and mail hosting for a number of
customers. Having backups is _really_ important to me. But I'm also busy and
underpaid and my hair's always on fire and my bank account never has quite
enough money in it, so tarsnap for me has never looked better than my current
backup system (BackupPC on a machine I have physical access to in a secure
location). Excel modeling to attempt to estimate my monthly costs for a
service is _obnoxious_.

You're not serving your customers' needs by being unable to fix problems that
they are actively complaining about because you're the only engineer in your
business capable of addressing them.

Colin's current way of doing business is actively interfering with his goals
-- assuming those goals are anything more than, "provide a cool backup service
as a hobby".

You don't have to become a disciple of SV startup culture. There's a
fantastically large middle-ground that allows for changing the business just a
little bit without sacrificing its soul.

The amazing thing here is that both Colin and Patrick are amazing engineers:
Colin as a software engineer, but Patrick as a business engineer. A business
is an abstraction that can -- and _should_ \-- be engineered. That means
understanding the scope and requirements of the problem being solved and then
coming up with a system that meets them. Colin, for godssake, take Patrick's
advice just as seriously as somebody should take your advice on cryptography.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Someone should just clone Tarsnap, run it as a business, and compete with
Colin. He's in it for the fun and hobby, not the money and no one can change
that in his personality. If anyone feels that a company can be doing something
better but refuses to do it better, then compete with it.

People keep trying to "fix" Colin instead of doing the entrepreneurial thing
and competing with him. He can't be fixed because there's nothing "wrong" with
him. That's like telling Good Will or the Salvation Army to change their
pricing. If you want a for-profit department store then start your own
Walmart. If you want a better backup service like Tarsnap then clone the thing
and do it better.

~~~
miles932
Better, why compete? Just wrap him! Put up a better marketing site, sell
packages, and pass the actual traffic back to Colin's servers. Volia!

~~~
vbit
It's not easy to wrap tarsnap. If you own one tarsnap account, how do you
split that up into multiple accounts? You'd end up writing code for account
management and authorization (not written by colin).

Also, you can't provide the guarantees you want. You could hire 24 hour tech
support but will they be able to troubleshoot colin's servers if they are down
and he is sleeping?

 __Update __: another business idea for Colin. Keep tarsnap as-is but license
the server code for a fee so others can run a business as proposed.

------
bernardom
> This page would literally be 1/5th the size of this blog post or less and
> take less than an hour to write, and would probably double Tarsnap’s sales
> by itself.

cperciva: Pretty please try this first and measure the effect? Would be super
interesting!

------
dwwoelfel
From the tarsnap mailing list:

 _I 'm currently suffering from a deluge of emails (turns out that a blog
post_ _from Patrick McKenzie saying that I shouldn 't have cut prices results
in_ _even more people signing up for Tarsnap than the price cut did, and most
of_ _my email comes from new users)_

[http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-
users/msg00895.html](http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00895.html)

------
noelherrick
Whenever I read Patrick, I'm reminded I have bad thinking about how to price
something. My idea of a fair price is = COST_TO_MAKE x 2 or something like
that. In reality, it's VALUE / 2\. Meaning, if a backup service provides $100
worth of value (reduction in risk), I should be ok with paying $50 for it. I
shouldn't reject a backup service because I know that it costs $1 and they're
charging me $100.

Consumers are pretty price sensitive, and business that sell directly to
consumers must cater to this. This is why Patrick is always advocating that
you start a business that sells to other businesses. A business doesn't mind
paying for something as long as the cost is below the value it gets them.
Isn't that the basics of business? Buy low, sell high? Buy a service that
provides $X value as long as the cost is < $X?

I first can across this difference when I was a newbie DBA. We needed to
upgrade our SQL Server cluster to the latest edition. I reviewed the
differences between the various editions, and decided we could use some of the
features in Enterprise vs. Standard. I did a little estimation, and showed how
much time we could save between the DBAs and the developers if we got
Enterprise. It was nowhere near the difference in the license costs, but I
passed my findings onto the IT manager and the CEO. The CEO said buy
Enterprise. I was stunned, and thought it was a bad decision. The reality was
that we got so much value out of SQL Server, it didn't matter that we paid
more than what was absolutely necessary.

Developers have the consumer pricing mindset as well. They complain about
IntelliJ, Xamarin, or Visual Studio licensing, or worry about SQL Server
costs. Even if an IDE provides you with a 1% performance gain, I'm pretty sure
that's worth it for most companies. Who cares if a
language/framework/database/server is free if reduces your output by even 5%.
That's just bad business. You can claim a license fee on your taxes, but you
can't claim an opportunity cost.

Consumer tight-fistedness for consumers can also be a bad thing. I live in a
relatively cheap area of the US. When I travel, I'm shocked at the prices. In
order to feel comfortable, I have to ask myself not Is this a good price? but
Would I rather pay $15 for a pina colada or go without? Often the answer is,
Yes, I'd rather sip a coconutty concoction on the beach in Hawaii than have an
extra $15 when I get home.

~~~
NoodleIncident
It's not wrong to think of stuff in terms of whether it's worth the price,
though. See: the Mr. Money Mustache school of thought, in which every dollar
you don't spend is a dollar closer to not ever having to work again.

------
pbreit
I think Patrick is usually right on the money but I have at least 2 gripes
with this post:

1) $50/month is WAY too much for the opening tier. Maybe $50/year. $50/month
may sound OK to someone who already has a business generating meaningful
revenue. But $50/month would be a show-stopper for most bootstrappers (which I
imagine is a core audience). Especially when compared to something like
Digital Ocean's $5/month.

2) The site design proposal looks pretty horrid. No doubt the current web site
is also lousy, I think he could stick with something that still "speaks" to
geeks. That "new" site design looks like one of these terrible templates which
I think actually could send the wrong message.

------
dmix
If Tarsnap added recurring billing and (much) better documentation with
examples, I think Colin would do just fine. He doesn't need to rethink his
marketing, there's enough geeks to keep him fed.

------
a3_nm
The article seems to derive its consequences from the unwritten assumption
that the goal of tarsnap is to earn as much money as possible, or to attract
as many customers as possible, or at least to attract those users who would
benefit from tarsnap.

Maybe this isn't cperciva's goal? Maybe he is just running the service as he
wants it to be?

~~~
girvo
Maybe we as geeks would be even better served if Colin was taking the money
he's currently leaving on the table from business that aren't us geeks
directly, but we have technical input in? Because currently he's missing out
on those customers, and I know for a fact (I tried) that where I work would
use tarsnap if Colin implemented what was shown here, they'd give him $500 a
month, and us geeks continue using it with pico dollars (that doesn't go
away!) and Colin gets more money and time to improve the service.

Seems good to me.

------
stevekemp
While the main post was interesting enough, and has already garnered
responses, I'm genuinely amazed that people pay for that level of "cron
monitoring".

Looking around I see at least three services ("probyapp.com",
"deadmanssnitch.com", and "cronwat.ch" \- the latter of which has an expired
SSL certificate).

FWIW one of the main reasons I've never used tarsnap is the pricing and the
picodollars, it never felt "real" enough, although obviously it is completely
transparent.

~~~
grannyg00se
It's in gigabytes right on the home page conveniently converted. How does
$0.25 / GB - month feel less real than....anything else?

------
sexmonad
My favorite thing about tarsnap is how damn reliable and trustworthy Colin is.
If I see tarsnap start to move towards whatever fad all the other SaaS
platforms are following today, I'll probably assume that they're trying to be
the next Dropbox. That might be the right decision for tarsnap, but I'd move
my backups.

------
corford
A very close approximation to patio11's vision of what tarsnap should be
already exists: [http://www.rsync.net](http://www.rsync.net). I use them with
duplicity instead of tarsnap for exactly the reasons patio11 went in to.

All the same benefits as tarsnap: de-dup, guaranteed privacy, OSS, headed by a
bona fide geek ([http://blog.kozubik.com/](http://blog.kozubik.com/)), fair
pricing. Plus: multi user sub accounts, 7 days of free server side snapshots
of your entire backup space and geo redundancy.

Plus business benefits: SAS 70 / PCI / SOX / HIPAA compliant, a company that's
been going for over a decade and isn't reliant on one person or supplier etc.

------
Gigablah
His advice re: paid articles/guides is basically what DigitalOcean is doing at
a larger scale, and with great success.

------
smw
This is pure brilliance. And probably a massive windfall for Colin if he acts
on it.

I loved leaving the existing service as a poorly publicized option, as it
keeps the hn-crowd-early-adopter-technical-consultants using the service, and
thus recommending it to the $500/mo businesses.

------
ThinkBeat
This is sort of like: "I am a business consultant, here is how other
businesses do things. Do this"

There is no problem in the way the service is priced. Its about the same way
cloud services charge. How much are you going to spend on a big AWS
installation, including bandwidth, storage and compute? You dont know? Well
knowing that to a penny is hard.

Well boo hoo. I was going to go on vacation and I dont wanna read email when I
am on a 21 day sabbatical. What happens if there is not enough money on the
credit card you are charging your other cloud services too? You get email, and
if you go over they stop running your stuff.. Go over even more and eventually
they will just delete your stuff. That is not just your backup that is your
entire platform.

I dont see the problem here. The use case is, I sign up for tarsnap, I put
some money in the account and then I dont want to ever think about it again.

Do you do think with other cloud platforms? Dont you want to keep an eye on
what it costs? Wouldnt that be prudent?

The same with tarsnap. You star using it, keep an eye on what it costs. Then
after a while you should be able to create a projection of how much its going
to cost. That to me seems like a good thing to do if you run a "serious"
business.

------
atmosx
Cool, Patrick takes over, I stop using tarsnap. I am a minority, I get that
and I'm fine with it, but that's the way I feel.

Side-Note: I don't feel okay about the way this turned out for Colin. He is a
member of our community, I'm reading his comments here, he is _active_.
Everyone here, judging his business model, with some people being extremely
harsh IMHO, feels like an on-line reality or something. I don't like it.

------
peferron
Lacking good counter-arguments to the article, I'll just vote with my wallet
and sign up for the current tarsnap today. To be fair, I had been
contemplating it for a while, but this just pushed me over the edge. I feel
manipulated. :D

~~~
lucb1e
I'll follow you, although I actually deposited money like half a year ago but
have yet to start testing it :P

------
netcan
This is the way to do criticism on the internet.

------
rakoo
As a geek, this sounds quite lucrative yet boring. I'd be torn.

Also, the proposed design looks ugly and absolutely standard, whereas the
current one has this touch that makes it stand out. As a geek, though.

------
lawncheer
I do not understand the negative reactions.

What about reframing the marketing/messaging changes the underlying tech
involved?

How is creating a complimentary B2B site, going to make the G2G one any less
valid?

I'm not understanding why there is a recurring theme in this thread that
having awesome underlying tech is somehow mutually exclusive from running a
great business as well.

------
eridius
How much of this could be done by building a new business that internally uses
tarsnap? The business provides these service plans and completely abstracts
the client away from the fact that it uses tarsnap under the hood. The primary
risks I can see:

1\. Colin gets hit by a bus and Tarsnap disappears. There's not much that this
new company could do to protect itself from this problem, short of convincing
Colin to implement a failsafe that, upon his verified death, hands full
control of Tarsnap (including any relevant private keys and passwords) over to
someone who can continue the service (and that someone could easily be the
founder of this new company).

2\. Technical support that this company could provide would be limited based
on the level of support that Colin would provide to this company. Again,
perhaps this company could draw up an agreement with Colin for priority
support, paying some large amount of money per month for the privilege.

3\. There's probably other issues I'm missing, perhaps this company can't make
the same guarantees tarsnap itself could (e.g. ability to be HIPAA-compliant)
due to not being in control of the technical aspects.

But otherwise, it could certainly provide all the metered pricing guarantees,
including guaranteeing backups don't get deleted after a 7 day shot clock. And
they may be able to make other guarantees (e.g. priority support) depending on
what they can convince Colin to deal with; I'm sure that it's easier to have a
single special customer that gets special treatment than it is to offer
priority support (and other guarantees) to arbitrary customers.

\---

On another note, I disagree with the author that metered pricing should be
removed entirely (although he seems to have already conceded that he will
never win that argument). Tiered pricing for businesses is great, but there's
still a need for cheaper pricing for various reasons.

Perhaps I'm an employee at a company that's testing Tarsnap to ensure it meets
the company's needs before making the case for the company to buy a service
plan. I may not have the authority to purchase a $50/mo plan, but I certainly
would have no qualms about paying $1 out of my own pocket to test the service
for two weeks.

Or maybe I'm an independent developer who's bootstrapping a business. I'm
still in development mode so I have no customers and therefore no income.
Being able to pay $2/mo for the backups I need is a lot more appealing than
paying $50/mo. When I finally launch my product and gain users, then I can
consider switching to the $50/mo plan for the guarantees it offers (e.g.
predictable pricing).

~~~
anon4
What I love about the concept of metered pricing is how direct it is. You pay
exactly for the resources in use. No strange statistics, heuristics and
assumptions have been applied to your data, whatever it is, that's what you're
using and that's that. You can then look at your month-to-month usage and do
the statistics yourself.

I do like the proposals in the article, but I wouldn't make the metered
pricing that invisible. I'd call it Elastic Tarsnap, put it in the same table
before Tarsnap Professional, give it a faded background and put the language
with the picodollar pricing on it. This will communicate that that's the
intended product for the truly paranoid power user who needs their personal
data backed up. Maybe even put that exact sentence under it "Backups for truly
paranoid power users (or unix geeks)". Because it's not just corporations that
have specific needs, we unix geeks have specific needs too.

~~~
eridius
I like Elastic Tarsnap. That appeals to me, I think it probably appeals to
everyone who does like the current pricing model, and it's pretty easy for
businesses to ignore.

------
baddox
I think Patrick is being far too gracious in his "great software, bad
business" dichotomy. The data deletion policy is all software, and is
ridiculously, laughably bad.

I wasn't aware of this "feature" before, and I don't currently have any need
for Tarsnap's service, but I don't think there is any way I would choose to
use that service or any other software product from the same guy/team. Maybe
the underlying cryptography is rock-solid, but that's completely irrelevant if
my backups are going to be deleted while I'm on vacation.

------
saurik
Am I the only person who sees flat "$X/mo" prices and rapidly adjusts their
trust in the provider downwards? It simply doesn't make any sense to me that
my backup provider (or my bandwidth provider, or my transaction processor, or
my Internet company) is providing me "unlimited anything" for any flat amount
of money: the pricing is clearly not related to my cost, so either there is
some massive flexible margin (which I should now be trying to strongly
negotiate against) or their business is based on something I don't understand
(or worse, that they don't understand), neither of which makes me want to
trust them with anything seriously important.

I want my provider to make money, but I also want to understand their business
enough to know whether I'm a customer that is making them money or one that
they are likely to want to drop in the near future. To be clear: I am not
complaining about things being expensive (I like paying for things!), and
agree that Tarsnap sounds like they aren't charging enough for the value that
they could provide me, but I want their business model to be transparent
(again, so I know they are making money off of me, so I know how to and
whether to negotiate, and so I feel comfortable they won't shut down their
service in a few months when they realize their customer's needs changed and
suddenly they aren't making money anymore), and putting up the standard three
price tiers hides all of that from me in a way that makes me nervous.

It also isn't like most of the really basic services people buy for their
businesses are priced like that already: I pay for power by the kilowatt,
phone calls by the minute, and bandwidth (for my servers) by the gigabyte.
Sometimes the base rate is thrown in (I get 5TB of transfer included with a
virtual unmanaged server, for example, not that I'm using many of those
anymore), but very few services I pay for have a fixed flat rate like this. I
thereby am having a difficult time appreciating the argument that it would be
easier to get a company to pay $100/mo than $5+/-$2 (although maybe the idea
is that these numbers are both simply "too small to think much about", which
would be an argument I could appreciate). Most services similar to Colin's are
priced by usage, not in fixed tiers.

To put this in perspective: I seriously have over fifty thousand dollars a
month of service costs for my business that I pay based on some variable cost
that Patrick is claiming I am somehow not going to be able to calculate and
would keep me from using these providers. In addition to the things already
mentioned, I pay by the hour for computers (EC2), by the message for e-mail
delivery, by both the amount and number for credit card charges (the bulk of
my costs), by the sheet of paper and drop of ink for printing, by the gallon
or mile for travel, and again by the gigabyte for content delivery (which is
somewhat different than the variable bandwidth I'm spending for my servers).
Almost all of the costs of my business are paid for on some variable cost
basis, and this is _not strange_ :(.

I can actually go further: my "right hand man" is paid by the hour, so a good
percentage of my human resource costs are variable as well. This _is_ somewhat
strange, sure, but when I was a consultant I was amazed at just how many
companies seemed to be entirely staffed by consultants... we'd go to the
business and find out that the don't even seem to have employees anymore, they
now just are contracting work out to three different consulting firms. Again:
billing for time and materials doesn't seem to cause companies to go running
for the hills, and at this point most of my friends are consultants, they all
bill this way, and they all have so much work they are quite picky about their
clients. The legal and accounting firms I work with are even more examples of
this (and ones where I've spent immense amounts of money over the years).

So, I just can't get behind this idea that pricing by the byte is somehow a
fundamental flaw in Tarsnap's business. Maybe it should be 10x more expensive
than it is: I can easily see the idea that the price of the service is not
commensurate to the value. Maybe it should have some lower tiers with fixed
pricing for entry-level usage: but then then top-level tier should be open-
ended, "talk to a sales associate", and negotiated on the gigabyte (again:
this is how most services I've seen that are targeting businesses are
operated; they don't have unlimited tiers, they have limited tiers and then
"pay by the X" at the high-end). Maybe it should also have a way to price
differentiate different kinds of customers: SLA, support, and purchase orders,
all make perfect sense to me. But I just don't understand why billing by the
month should be considered better than billing by usage.

~~~
rwallace
Depends on if the raw material consumed by usage costs a substantial part of
the sale price.

Personally I'd like to have flat-rate unmetered electricity and not have to
think about how much I'm using, but reality dictates otherwise: if it was that
way, people would use more, the power company would have to build more
generators and burn more fuel, financial and environmental costs would
substantially increase and we'd all lose out in the end.

But none of that applies to my cable Internet connection, which as a result is
flat-rate unmetered (well, up to some threshold that's high enough I forget
how high it is; it's something like a few hundred gigabytes per month, more
than I'm going to need); so I don't need to worry about exactly how many
gigabytes I'm using. This is a good thing.

The value Tarsnap provides to businesses is much larger than the raw cost of
the bandwidth and disk storage, so it makes sense for it to be unmetered and
give customers one less thing to worry about.

------
jamesrom
While I do not disagree that some problems this article tries to solve are
problems, I completely disagree with the way this article tries to solve them.

Oh, and that redesign is way worse than the current design.

------
deathanatos
> Even without compression and data duplication, very few people have a good
> understanding of how much data they have at any given time, because machines
> measure data in bytes but people measure data in abstractions.

I have to beg to differ, as I know this value for where I work. Sure, don't
know it to a byte, but I know enough digits * price per GiB/month = reasonable
estimate of cost. (And I know the before and after compression.)

Of course, his real point is:

> different bytes have sharply different values associated with them

This is true. However, I don't think that I should be charged by the value of
my byte, ever. This is something I despise ISPs for, in that they forbid you
to run servers, because what? those bytes have a different flavor?

Same thing here: some bytes are more valuable that others, but I want to be
charged by the level of service you're giving me per byte. If you're giving my
really-valuable bytes and my not-so-valuable bytes the same service, I expect
the same price. If there's a service difference, show me that, and show me the
difference in cost for you to provide a different level of service.

Of course, I think he gets this, because if you read he suggested tiers of
service, they not only scale up the available storage, but also other things,
like "Custom legal / compliance documentation". Different service -> different
price.

------
jacquesm
A few years ago there was a post here that told Patrick how he should run
_his_ business. That was a classless act and it made me pretty mad. At least
Patrick had the good grace to first enquire if a post like this would really
be welcome and he proceeded with Colin's permission (see twitter status linked
elsewhere in this thread). Now I hold both Colin and Patrick in high regard,
so I'll try to be as balanced as I can in my response here.

Patrick has a number of valid points but as far as I know Colin is well aware
of almost every one of them. Just like other people shouldn't be telling
Patrick how to run his business Patrick would do well to recognize that Colin
and he have different drives and factors not easily digested into a blog post
(however well intentioned) that equate to optimizing conversion or maximizing
the number of dollars taken out.

None of this could not have said in an email to Colin, and as such it serves
as a way for Patrick to show publicly how good he is at fixing problems that
are related to marketing and conversion, it does very little for Colin other
than to make it very public that he's not running his business in a way that
caters to most enterprise types. _And that 's possibly a good thing_,
depending on what your assumptions are on what motivates Colin.

I'm going to send my own $0.02 on what Patrick wrote to Colin in an email
rather than to post it here for all the world to see, Both Patrick and Colin
are good men and I'd rather see stuff like this happen in private.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and even writing a solicited
blog post is not always the best solution to the problem at hand.

------
msteinert
> I trust us, but I trust Colin more, so I wish there was a simple “In case of
> emergency, get Colin on the phone and have him securely transfer a copy of
> the key files backed to me” option in case disaster strikes.

If Colin has your private keys then he could be compelled to reveal the
contents of your data to a third party. This seems to run counter to the
design goals of the system.

Otherwise I found the posting to be enlightening. I learned quite a bit from
reading it!

------
nekopa
Someone mentioned charging a 1000% markup for a flashy marketing site, but
couldn't it be more like a heroku/aws type deal?

Use tarsnap as the backend, but add a more user friendly interface to it. And
be up front about it, don't pretend you're doing something you're not. Colin
could keep doing what he likes, and basically someone else will be handling
the marketing side of things, and interface development, customer support
etc...

------
porker
I agree with patio11's post... except for his derogatory comments about PAYG
pricing.

As someone with a few side projects and start-ups, all of which are at the
proof of concept/mildly profitable stage, it matters to me that there's a way
to get started for less than $50/month. $50/month * 10 SaaS platforms = my
profits.

His approach makes sense if the aim is to extract the most value from
businesses; but what about nurturing new companies?

------
andrewcooke
so what? my impression is that colin is happy with things as they are. why
should he change his business, which makes him happy, because someone else
thinks it should be different?

the aim of life is to be happy, not to meet someone else's expectations.

~~~
patio11
I'm intentionally value-agnostic about whatever makes Colin happy in the post.
As long as operating businesses suboptimally is not in fact his terminal
value, there exists a transition between Tarsnap and Tarsnap' which makes him
_even happier_. Everybody wins, especially Colin, which strikes me as a happy
outcome because I like seeing when geeks are suitably rewarded for creating
substantial improvements to the world, which Colin has done.

If running Tarsnap as a free public utility is the light he wants to bring to
the world, the outlined Tarsnap' is _better at that_ than his Tarsnap is.
Charge businesses more, invest in better UX, subsidize non-business users
straight to "free." If he wants to lay on a beach sipping iced cocoa, this is
more beach and more cocoa. If he wants more time with his family and less time
in the inbox, this is a trivial modification away from that. ("Make money, buy
your way out of inbox.")

~~~
andrewcooke
maybe he needs someone else to show him how to be happy.

shrug. in my experience, people telling me how to live my life tend to be a
pain in the arse. but maybe i am projecting.

------
asavi
> many users have hundreds of archives adding up to several terabytes, but pay
> less than $10/month.

$0.25 / GB-month x 1000gb = $250 / 1TB-month

~~~
pronoiac
Deduplication is a marvellous thing.

------
prutschman
There's one part of this that I really don't understand.

> here exist geeks who run servers with hobby projects, but they don’t have
> serious backup needs. Have they taken minimum sane steps with regards to
> their hobby projects like spending hours to investigate backup strategies,
> incorporating to limit their liability, purchasing insurance, hiring
> professionals to advise them on their backup strategies, etc? No? Then their
> revealed preference is that they don’t care all that much if they lose all
> their hobby data.

I understand how investigating backup strategies and hiring professionals for
advice help with the goal of protecting my data. I do not understand how
insurance and, particularly, incorporating to limit liability help protect my
hobby data.

Both of those things make sense if I'm engaged in business activity requiring
me to protect data in order to make money. How do they help me if I'm engaged
in an activity that requires me to have continued access to the data for its
own sake?

~~~
smw
I think his point was simply that, for the most part, the only reason you'd
pay $500 a month for backup is if you value your data much more than if it's a
personal or hobby thing.

Many businesses do. Making it easy for them to buy the product will probably
be lucrative.

~~~
prutschman
I understood the point he was aiming at. My quibble was with how he was making
it. He demonstrates elsewhere at least some sensitivity to the difference
between making money doing X as a value and just doing X as the value. Here,
though, he very nearly says that, by revealed preference, if you're not
monetizing your activity you don't actually care about it.

------
jordanlev
Could anyone explain in more detail this tidbit from the article:

> Did you want to backup your MySQL database? Did you backup the actual data
> files rather than a mysqldump? Sucks to be you...

What are the dangers of backing up the data files instead of a mysqldump?

~~~
patio11
Briefly: that's a great way to get a backup which is not actually an accurate
and consistent representation of your database, unless everything about both
your setup and the exact state of MySQL's memory and your write usage over the
interval of your backup operation breaks in your favor. For more detail, see
the part about "Copying Table Files" in the backup chapter of the manual.

~~~
jordanlev
Makes sense -- thanks.

I had a scary moment when I thought we were backing up our databases as data
files... fortunately someone smarter than me set that up and in fact our
backups are mysqldump's. Phew!

------
mercurialshark
I agree with most everything he says except, I really love "Online backups for
the truly paranoid." It resonates with me on a primal level and professionals
want security that is above and beyond utterly reliable.

------
hyp0
A simple solution is to build a service atop tarsnap - just as it builds atop
AWS.

The purpose of a small business isn't always to make money, or to provide the
best possible service - it can be to create your own job, that you _love_ ,
that is the perfect job for you.

DHH talks about this.

There's a Reader's Digest story about a guy fishing all day, and an entrepreur
tells him he should hire people, increase prices, do marketing etc. Why? So he
can retire, and spend all day fishing! But that's what he does now...

That said, there's some good ideas about how to get money out of customers in
the article, if that's your priority.

------
epaga
Just to chime in if colin is reading these, the 7-day deletion period is
pretty much what is stopping me from joining up to have an extra backup in
addition to dropbox. Fully agree with Patrick on that point.

------
mfincham
I have several objections to this, but one of the largest is that while the
current Tarsnap site looks eminently trustable, the suggested replacement
screams I WAS MADE FROM A TEMPLATE. THIS SITE IS A SCAM.

------
Brian-Puccio
> Unlimited storage, up to 500 GB of media

> ...

> Unlimited storage, up to 1 TB of media

No. That's not unlimited.

~~~
tjr
I stumbled over that initially too, but the subsequent paragraphs explain:
unlimited storage of data except for media files, and limited storage for
media files, trusting the user to be honest about it. The intent is to focus
on storing things other than photos / videos / music.

~~~
lucb1e
Oh thanks, now I finally understand that too. Had the same thought as you and
the post you're replying to.

------
DomreiRoam
I like the article but I think I like the current website. its austerity tells
me that the value is in the engineering, that the product roadmap is not
dictated by marketing people. I have a little distrust feeling when I land on
a fancy website for a technical product. Something tells me that the company
behind the product had been acquired and soon the product will cease to be
good. Maybe we can redesign the site but not to much. :)

------
atmosx
Just made a script that reads picodollars and displays OSX notifications[1]. I
like desktop notifications but for me emails work too. Almost everything the
OP asks can be easily automated because of tarsnap's simplicity, from the
website to the client.

[1] [https://github.com/atmosx/argos](https://github.com/atmosx/argos)

------
blrgeek
I just signed up for an account and put in $10 so I can be grandfathered in
once Colin upgrades the pricing, and marketing :)

I would much rather prefer a robust commercial entity behind my service
providers (+ the super credible technical capability of Colin), than Colin
alone.

------
pbiggar
One of the problems with HN is that the only people who come out to comment
are those against the article. There is a large contingent of "fuck you, pay
me" people on HN too - where are they when there's are article like this they
could support!

------
mnx
I don't want to sound like a douche, but what is good about tarsnap as it is?
(besides the price)?

Is the encryption or deduplication somehow unique? Or isn't the only unique
element exactly what the author of this post proposes to eradicate?

------
ChuckMcM
I'm curious if tarsnap has an API for enquiring on your balance and support
for Stripe payments. Seems I could add a line to my crontab that would query
it and send it more money if it needed it.

------
lpgauth
Haven't read the TOS... but there might be an opportunity here to build a
"user friendly" backup service on top of Tarsnap. Basically turning Tarsnap
into a platform.

If I had more free time...

------
nmolo
Anyone want to help me make TaaS? (Tarsnap as a Service)

~~~
Evgeniuz
Isn't Tarsnap already a service?

------
jebblue
I use rsync, tar thrashes the disk when the majority of the files in the
backup set don't change.

------
petemc_
I wonder how long it will be before someone creates a 2048 interface to
tarsnap.

------
njharman
Instead of talking about how you would run it, actually build and run it. If
your "fork" addresses the needs of an under served market, congrats you've
just hit step 3. Profit!

Otherwise talk is cheap. More so, talk about how someone who has actually done
something successful is doing it wrong.

~~~
tdoggette
You've missed the context of this document.

------
buro9
I would stop using the product if that was the pricing model.

I originally used Tarsnap for a small amount of really important personal
data. Data I already have encrypted, and backed up. But data I felt strongly
about having a trusted off-site backup for.

It's small data, my billing account shows me I spend around $0.20 per month on
this.

Without having been able to try Tarsnap, use it, come to trust it... I would
never have had my business sign-up for it and I would continue with home-baked
solutions for disaster recovery.

For a startup, being able to translate that utility pricing model to the
backups we initially made meant this was extremely affordable and increased
with usage (and theoretically our revenue).

I wouldn't have dropped $50 or $100 per month and so would have delayed,
avoided and built our own system that was nothing as good as Tarsnap but
fulfilled the basic requirement.

Later I'd be in the realm of thinking Tarsnap was reasonably priced, but would
I change everything? Probably, but only when it was overdue.

The proposed pricing model introduces a big cliff to climb.

I wouldn't climb that cliff until it was long overdue.

It is precisely because the pricing scales with our use that I could try it
personally, and for the startup, without fear of a surprise.

Perhaps I'm no longer your market.

~~~
buro9
Apparently it's not the done thing (and will get downvoted) to state that I
won't use a $50 per month service when my personal current fee and level of
usage is $0.20 per month.

A 250x price rise isn't going to keep me though.

And my point was that it was the experience of the personal usage of Tarsnap
that sold me on the business use. Because I knew it would start small and low
cost, and scale with our needs just as a pure utility would.

Somehow, pointing this out deserves down votes.

------
lawnchair_larry
Is there some reason that a guy who made a bingo card creator has any real
authority here? That probably sounds harsh, but I don't really understand why
he feels he is in a position to criticize a very good product.

~~~
tikhonj
This sort of comment really annoys me.

First of all, the post is full of constructive, actionable advice. Does the
advice seem good? Then that's all that matters! The post stands by itself even
without knowing who patio11 is.

Personal attacks like this literally add nothing while at the same time
actively stifling future discussions. You should _never_ have a personal
attack unless there is a very good, concrete reason for it to be relevant
_and_ you're still polite about it. Anything else is simply both rude and
unconstructive.

Second of all, he's somebody who both has a successful business in a vaguely
similar niche _and_ used to be a successful consultant optimizing others
businesses. That is, he was a professional _doing exactly this sort of
criticism_! And people were paying him for it. Because it's extremely useful.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Nothing about my post is a personal attack.

I legitimately have no idea what business he has talking about tarsnap this
way. I clicked his "about" link and it said he made bingo card creator
software.

He has a ton of HN karma, so I expected downvotes, but I'm still puzzled as to
why he would make this post.

You're saying he's had success in something similar to online backups? What
was it?

~~~
pbiggar
That is exactly the point. Judge on his words, not on who he is.

FWIW, he is probably the most well-known CRO expert there has ever been. He
has exactly the authority needed to write this post.

[edit: "CRO expert" is too strong, as noted below. I was thinking something
"SaaSy". Basically, in this community, he is the expert in some forms of SaaS
marketing/pricing.]

~~~
patio11
Just FYI for everybody here who might have a budding consultancy inside of
them and is wondering if there still exists demand for it (YES!), there exist
quite a few people who do CRO who a) are much better at it than I am, b) do
quite well for themselves, and c) have, quite reasonably, never even heard my
name.

If we add a lot of constrains like "Software! No wait, B2B software! For
geeks!", for each constraint you add the pool of talent gets rather sharply
smaller and my confidence that there exist lots of better options than me
accordingly decreases.

~~~
traviscj
This is also how Ph.D.s work.

------
vizzah
What a silly silly post. Not everything in the world must be "enterprised" and
"commercialized". You seem to be on an absolutely different planet to the idea
and ideology of Tarsnap.

Your re-design template is so awful (and so bland, so tasteless $25 template),
comparing to the original one, which is unique, light and with a thought-out
UI.

Colin is happy to provide a useful service and there is a target market for
this service (i.e. - other geeks). It is not his intention to bring the
service to the "next level", because running (and dedicating even more time)
to this service is not what he wants to do to make a living.

~~~
Snail_Commando
You may be surprised to learn that Colin asked him to write this post.

~~~
vizzah
From what I can see, the author offered Colin "advice" in a form of a
consultation as a public blog post. A simple conversion from "unsolicited"
advice.

~~~
pdonis
No, he wrote an article that Colin specifically _asked_ him to write:
[https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/451262554069663744](https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/451262554069663744)

