Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

What was very annoying about the sourceforge story years ago was that the only way they tried to monetize it was by selling "enterprise" versions. I wanted to use SF (eventually did for a couple projects), but wanted to use it a lot, but didn't want the ads. They shot themselves in the foot by not offering an affordable subscription service. I'm happy to pay bitbucket/github/whoever $x/month, but not $yyyy/month.<p>I may grow in to needing the $yyyy/month plan, but most people don't start off at that end, and the majority of people who can afford something that expensive (because they're an operating concern with a lot of money) probably already have a solution in place (hence their ability to make money).

As a hacker who just terminated his FB account, it sounds like I'm the target audience. But I have to confess that after reading the blog post and clicking through to the faux Kickstarter page, my response went from "That could be interesting" to "That's disappointing."<p>If they are going to leverage the Kickstarter model, then they should at least learn from other KS projects: show me the problem, build a prototype, show the prototype solving the problem, play cool music, and for crying out loud look at me (the camera) when talking.<p>There's probably a good reason that Kickstarter doesn't accept nebulous web businesses - scaling manufacturing costs real money, but building a software prototype is cheap. If someone had made a video dryly explaining GitHub or DuckDuckGo as a concept prior to developing them, I wouldn't have signed up. But I find them invaluable today.

&#62; <i>we have been spending the majority of our engineering resources the past 8 months building a “secret project”.... Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware.</i><p>So basically... it's already built.<p>&#62; <i>To manifest this grand vision, we are officially launching a Kickstarter-esque campaign. We will only accept money for this financially sustainable, ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining minimum critical mass as $500,000, which is roughly equivalent to ~10,000 backers.</i><p>Oh that's interesting. The grand vision will not manifest until $500k is raised. But isn't the product already basically finished?<p>So what happens if they don't raise $500k? Do they kill the product and flush 8 months of hard work (and presumably a bunch of money) down the drain? Doubt it. That doesn't make any sense.<p>Something is fishy here.

I'm not going to prognosticate about whether or not this service will take off. I really hope it does - the raison d'être seems genuine, or at the very least, passionately backed.<p>But that seems to be the very problem with it. In trying not to bury his lead, I believe Dalton Caldwell has let it take over the pitch. 95% "why" and 5% "what". 10 minutes in, I was still scratching my head wondering what the service will look like. And the name App.net certainly doesn't do the cause any favours. The first decent explanation finds itself relegated to question 2 of the FAQs.<p>This is an audacious attempt, and I laud that. But the pitch, in my opinion, needs an overhaul. Diaspora was also about the "why", but they addressed the "what" really early in their Kickstarter pitch.

Seems odd to not actually use KickStarter. Won't running a homegrown fundraising platform distract from solving the messaging problem? And don't you have to make a case for something that KickStarter already spent a lot of time making a case for? (I was turned off when I first heard about KickStarter, and I still am, to a lesser extent, but I finally pitched in for two projects.)

What pain point exactly is this trying to solve? That twitter is ad-spammed? I'll admit I rarely use twitter, but I can't recall ever seeing ads on it. (I can, as a side note, recall how /slow/ twitter pages load.) That twitter changes its API frequently and doesn't give adequate notice to the people who develop for it? How exactly does a user interact with app.net? I signed up for a twitter account because I wanted to hear a lot about a beta for a video game. How does this work with app.net? Are only broadcasters paying members?<p>Kudos for taking on the big dogs, though.

<i>..the takeaway here is that the services provided by SourceForge/Github are too important to its users to be ad-supported.</i><p>Why muddy the waters like that? The takeaway is that the incentives a company adopts are consequential and will define the culture and the product.

I hate to be old school media here...but I wish this was announced on Monday or any other time besides Friday afternoon, when it will get less notice. Because it's a great announcement.

So, this is a service where I'll pay $5 a month -ish to use a network that's basically the same as Twitter (in particular, not decentralized), except with no users and, considering the amount of effort being put into Twitter clients, probably inferior clients? It'll have no ads, but the ads on Twitter are pretty minimal from what I've seen, and presently as a third party client user I don't get any. It'll be open to "apps" which can extend the experience (and have a longer character limit), but to me Twitter's simplicity is its core selling point. It'll supposedly be used by the top 10,000 hackers, but identi.ca already tried that and it didn't work - network effect is important.<p>I love the spirit of this, but as described, I wouldn't use the service if it were free. Twitter isn't even in the same ballpark as SourceForge. <i>shrug</i>

Am I the only one who doesn't feel like Twitter is hammering me with ads? OTOH I don't use Twitter very much and when I do it's almost exclusively on my phone or iPad.

Seems to me that 'ad supported' is always going to be more attractive to funders/investors, because the <i>potential</i> is effectively unlimited (certainly by comparison with paid-for services).<p>With pay-for services, there's a much smaller number of people who are going to (or be able to) pay, and when you start looking at those numbers, it's never the fabled 'hockey stick to heaven' that people dream of.<p>What if twitter just sold access to their stream, and a few million orgs (companies, individuals) were paying, oh, say, $20/month. And let's say... 2 million - why, that's only $480/million per year <i>maximum</i>! Gosh - who would ever want to invest in <i>that</i>? Instead, by going with 'ads', there's always the promise of some big change that could explode the revenue down the line.

I love this idea, but the only reason I can come up with that you need half a million dollars to do it is that it's a pivot, and not a bootstrapped enterprise.<p>If GitHub is being used as the example in this line of argument, then why not follow their lead and build something people need and raise money later? Wouldn't you then be even more likely to convince hackers — the primary community you're trying to serve?

Anyone else thinking about Diaspora as soon as he mentioned Kickstarter?<p>Grandiose vision, but going to war with Twitter today is as foolish as trying to take on Facebook.<p>You're not going to attract a mainstream audience and gain serious critical mass just because you're an open platform and developer-friendly. In the case of SourceForge/GitHub, it was different because the demographic is entirely developers. Not so with social networks or media companies of any kind, the audience is mainstream, that means college students, celebrities, high school girls, etc.<p>"Every battle is won before it is ever fought" (Sun Tzu) -- learn from Diaspora's failure, don't repeat it.

Amazing that there is no mention of <a href="http://Status.net" rel="nofollow">http://Status.net</a> anywhere this topic is discussed.<p>Evan Prodromou has been trying to crack that nut for many years now...

Why screw over all the developers who had been using App.net? I assume that their App Landing page developer service is going to retire if this new product goes.

I'm probably not the target audience for this because I don't understand what the proposal is. Or maybe I'd have to read some of his earlier posts to understand what this is about.<p>What is a real time feed and service or a social platform in general? Is this basically Facebook sans the UI for a monthly fee?

Are there github accounts for the 'team to do it' that contain the 'infrastructure'?

Will there be a free tier?

Summary: "I propose receiving $500k USD of your money (with terms like Kickstarter, but not actually via Kickstarter) to build my new startup, in exchange for giving you zero equity. I know it's audacious."