

Two Years of Pinboard - mcantelon
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/07/two_years_of_pinboard/

======
shii
Sub $3 adopters represent wut-wut.

Srsly though, thanks maciej and team, love pinboard and use it e'erday. It's
pretty much second nature to highlight, right-click, 'Post Page to Pinboard',
fill some pithy tags, and feel instant dopamine flood of peace for some
reason. Great when I have that one site on the tip of my cerebellum that I can
just grep through pinboard for. Way to go on the 2 years and coming years of
success.

~~~
idlewords
Thank you!

~~~
kn0thing
Congrats on the success! A simple, elegant app that just gets shit done -- and
with a revenue model.

Bit of a blast from the past here, but I want to thank you for some
unintentional inspiration you gave me 6 years ago when Steve & I launched
reddit. You see, I've always kept a "wall of negative reinforcement"
(basically negative commentary that I print out and stick on the wall) that I
find quite inspiring.

You deleted the post, but "Y Combinator’s 2005 Summer Founders Program: A
Complete Dud" was one of the things that always gave me a boost during some of
reddit's darker days.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050813233842/http://tech.rufy.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050813233842/http://tech.rufy.com/entry/80)

It may sound ridiculous, but I really do appreciate it. I've been fortunate to
have had immensely supportive people in my life - namely my parents - yet I've
always relished criticism & negative feedback (maybe it's from growing up with
a girl's name?) as motivation to push myself harder to better both my work and
myself. Thank you.

~~~
idlewords
I think you may have me confused with someone else. I rolled my eyes at Reddit
back when you launched (thinking it was yet another Delicious clone :-) ) but
fortunately never put those sentiments in writing, so I didn't have anything
to recant when I changed my mind a couple of years later.

The post you cite seems to be by some guy named Lucas?

~~~
kn0thing
Sorry! I fell down the rabbit hole of Internet surfing and totally botched the
link - I'd found this entry from your delicious bookmark:
[http://www.delicious.com/search?p=summer+flounders&chk=&...](http://www.delicious.com/search?p=summer+flounders&chk=&context=userposts|maciej|&fr=del_icio_us&lc=)

Back then I was actively monitoring the delicious bookmark for reddit.com and
your note had made me chuckle.

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joshu
Pretty sure delicious was smaller than 27 million bookmarks just two years in.

Otoh, that was only 20-ish days of growth when I left yahoo...

~~~
johnx123-up
Bookmarking concept was just evolved then.

~~~
shrikant
Also, while the devs in the forums were really nice, it seemed like they
couldn't just _do_ anything about feature requests or bugs and had to wait for
some sort of lordly blessing.

With Maciej it's pretty much drop an email to the mailing list, and if the
request is reasonable enough, BAM, it's there!

~~~
joshu
The forum happened a year or two after the acquisition by yahoo. If it was
before the Big Rewrite, all changes were on hold until after the Big Rewrite.
If it was after, most of the engineers on the backend were moved elsewhere, so
nothing that required backend changes could ever be done.

It was more like the experience with inboard in the early days.

------
huhtenberg
I really like maciej's writing style. Something about it that creates an
instant feeling of rapport and sympathy.

------
look_lookatme
Sometimes when I feel blue about HN and what it has become, I refer to
Dabblers and Blowhards for a little bit of levity. It was an essay before its
time. Maciej is a fine writer and if I could recommend a single thing he's
written it would be Scott and Scurvy (as much as I love Attacked By Thugs for
comedic reasons).

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mrsolo
I thought Pinboard was just another bookmarking site, they are not. Their
archival account is something that I've been looking for as an alternative to
Evernote, which is ok, but it is getting slower and less stable as my archive
gets bigger. Pinboard is promising, competition is good.

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petercooper
_The fee is based on the formula (number of users_ $0.001), so the earlier you
join, the less you pay.*

The current price is $9.37 which indicates 9370 users, yet this post says
12,500 active. But if the first customer was $2.04, is it $2.04 + u * 0.001?
So meaning $9.37 reflects 7330 users? Sorry for picking through the math but
I'm interested in stuff like this :-) Did a big group of users get in free
during a certain period, etc?

It's a beautiful business model in a way. It doesn't suit people who want to
trial it out but the social proof of 12,000 people already being through the
doors makes the $9 more palatable to latecomers. I'm wondering if I could
apply a similar model to my e-mail newsletters (which people keep saying I
should charge for).

~~~
idlewords
The multiplier has changed over time. It started out as a tenth of a penny and
has been reduced several times, so you can't really math out without
additional info. Not that it's stopped anyone.

~~~
petercooper
Ah, cunning! :-) (Or, more likely, a necessity to stop the signup fee being
$100 by now ;-)) Good work.

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leftnode
I love Pinboard. The killer feature is Twitter integration. I do 99% of my
Twitter browsing on my phone, and when I see a link that might be interesting,
I just favorite it and Pinboard comes by and picks up those favorites for me
to read later.

Very awesome service.

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mise
Congratulations.

It would be useful if you wrote beside the current figures Tue percentage
change on last year.

It also struck me that linking the price to a growth factor may end up
overpricing your service leading to a halt in signups. Is this the case or
not?

~~~
idlewords
I avoid percentages because I think they can be a little silly when talking
about small absolute numbers. I think we had just over 2k active users last
year at this time, for what that's worth.

I am not worried about overpricing the site as long as I think the signup fee
represents good value for new users.

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zeemonkee
Excellent product - been a happy customer for 6 months. The idea of increasing
the price by a fraction per user is a good one - the more customers you have
the more expensive it gets to run, but you also reward early adopters.

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JanezStupar
Another happy customer here.

I wish more people would signup - since that would assure long term
stability/security of my bookmark archive.

And GZ on your birthday Pinboard!

------
heyimfromreddit
DigitalOne seems to offer much more than I get with Linode. Anyone have
experience with them?

~~~
idlewords
Heh, yeah. You will certainly get a lot more than you do with Linode. Great
host if you like adventure and hate to be bothered with status updates or
receive credit in the event of an outage. Enjoy!

~~~
dorian-graph
Who did you switch to after DigitalOne?

