Ask HN: When did people start paying for your SaaS and why? - <AUTHOR> When did people start paying for your SaaS?
How many times did it take before you got it right? I don't suspect most people get it right on their first go, so what have you taken from your failures and what have been the biggest factors in your success in terms of gaining traction with your SaaS?
In particular, what marketing/promo tactics have served you best? <comment><USER3> I got the first paying customer for Appointment Reminder the first day it was open for business. (DB id #22, after a bunch of test accounts and friends & family demos.) ~2.5 years and ~$1,000 later he still happily pays $29 a month. This was not unknowable prior to launching the site (though I was still on pins and needles): I had already walked the sales pitch for it to enough businesses in downtown Chicago that I was pretty sure some number would buy what I was selling if it were put in front of them.

I think people who are pre-business vastly overestimate the difficulty of getting the first sale and probably vastly underestimate the difficulty of reaching scale. Gail Goodman has a presentation on the Long SaaS Ramp of Death. When you say those words in a group of SaaS entrepreneurs you'll see pained recognition on everybody's faces, even those (of us?) whose businesses are fairly successful. Dear God does figuring out the scalable marketing piece take time. (I've got it figured out for Bingo Card Creator, but have only isolated bits and pieces of the orchestra playing in disjointed fashion for Appointment Reminder.)

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman- constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant- contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

I kind of feel like I beat on these drums to death, but organic SEO, AdWords, lifecycle emails, and an optimized first-run experience are sort of my favorite arrows in the quiver for increasing sales. That and a whole lot of just _grinding it out_.

Also, tie a string around your finger for Rob Walling's presentation from Microconf 2013 where he takes HitTail, a SaaS he acquired, from ~X to ~30X in recurring revenue over the course of a year. (There are numbers in the presentation but I remember him asking us to be circumspect about them.) He goes into month by month detail of what he was doing, and you'll understand the level of sheer frustration involved until hard work and ingenuity starts to reveal "flywheels" (his word for scalable/repeatable acquisition channels). As far as I know, this isn't on the Internet yet, but I expect it will be late this year.

<comment><USER4> Here are some details from Rob Walling's presentation:

[http://www.it-engelhardt.de/rob-walling-how- to-10x-in-15-mon...](http://www.it-engelhardt.de/rob-walling-how- to-10x-in-15-months-microconf-2013/)

<comment><USER5> By the way, does anyone know how hittail works? What makes it better than looking at google analytics?

<comment><USER6> (HitTail user here.)

It has a proprietary algorithm that looks at the keywords people are finding you with and letting you know which long tail keywords you have a clear shot of ranking high (e.g. position #1) for so you can write specific content targeting that phrase. Unfortunately, it's getting harder to do this as more referrer traffic is coming in as (not provided)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! That makes sense. I've noticed more and more "not provided". What's the deal with that? I was assuming I was doing something wrong :-( I don't much seo.

<comment><USER7> If you're authenticated when doing a search, google hides the kw for the target site. What you see now in keywords is just from users that aren't signed-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I launched BromBone a few months ago. About 150 people signed up and tried it at least once. Most of them never came back after that. No one ever paid.

A few weeks ago, I refocused BromBone into a subset of what it was before. I've already got a handful of paid accounts and I expect a few more soon. I'm not rich yet, but some people paying is way better than no one paying. There is hope this time.

For BromBone, I think there are two main things that have made the difference:

1) The first version of the service would make developer's lives a little easier but still leaves a lot of development for them to do. The new version completely eliminates a pain for them with very little work on their part.

The first version could have been helpful to a lot of different people. I thought a bigger market would be better. Instead it meant: * I couldn't focus on one community * I had to try to market to communities I didn't really understand * It fix half of a lot of people's problems, but didn't completely fix anyone's

2) The new version has a landing page that looks more like a traditional SaaS landing page. I tried to go my own way to much with the previous landing page. I'm not a designer, and I didn't pull it off. I think the new landing page looks more legit to people and makes them more likely to recommend it to their boss.

\--

BromBone v1 was a "Headless Browser as a Service". BromBone v2 is "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google". [http://www.BromBone.com](http://www.BromBone.com)

<comment><USER9> Your targeted market definition for v2 is better. I personally wouldn't have been interested in the "Value Prop" of V1 because I couldn't extract how it would make my world better. V2 phrasing is very clear, and I think you can go a long way with that. You might also look at saying giving much better SEO to Angular(etc) websites.

<comment><USER9> By the way, I read your site more - and I really think you're on to something. Partner with SEO Moz

<comment><USER10> I don't think so. Perhaps I'm wrong but I thought that:

a) Google CAN read single-page JS based websites

b) Google doesn't like it if you treat the googlebot differently to a real browser. That's blackhat and you'll be penalised if they find out.

<comment><USER11> a) Google can read JS, but they can't necessarily navigate through all the different pages of a single page app. Their recommendation for that is currently to use #! and then when GoogleBot visits a page and sees the #!, GoogleBot will replace that with ?escaped_fragment=... It's then up to you to provide the content of the page to GoogleBot, and that is what this service appears to do.

b)As long as you are serving the same content to Google, it is not considered blackhat seo, and you won't be penalized. Cloaking would be serving different content to Google than you serve to the user in an effort to boost your rankings over what the content the user sees would rank.

<comment><USER10> I stand corrected. Thanks for making that clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is for [https://circleci.com](https://circleci.com). It was about 6 months in.

We started making a very general CI service, and it took 3 months to realize that we should refocus on web-apps only. At that time, we started to get a bit of traction: maybe 10ish customers were using it, and after a month we asked them to pay.

Most said they would, but for many, the service was too slow and it caused their tests to fail. So we spent another 6 weeks rewriting the backend to make Circle incredibly fast (we had been using t1.micros, we changed to huge machines with LXC, and many custom tweaks), and then our first paying customer, Zencoder, paid.

So we only got it slightly wrong once in this startup, but we had both fucked up a startup before, and learned a lot from it (mostly talk to your customers, and make sure what you're building is something they really need and want).

For us, it wasn't marketing/promo tactics at all, it was just to focus on a great product. Our biggest growth has come from word-of-mouth, and our biggest customers (eg Kickstarter, Shopify, a few more I can't name) came in organically. We got a reputation as being best of breed, and spent a lot of time focusing on how to improve lives for customers.

Rather than thinking in terms of tactics/promos, I would focus on making sure that people want your product, and they want it so much they tell their friends (in our case, colleagues at meetups and over twitter). That's long- term sustainable growth. (You certainly do need short-term growth tactics too, but its harder without the great product behind it).

<comment><USER13> Have you ever considered a "pay-per-build" option?

I am a single developer, but would love to have continuous integration tests on my personal projects. I have a lot of small projects (10), and $49 is too much for me to consider.

When I think about it, that might keep people from upgrading to your top- tiers, never mind me :-)

<comment><USER12> We did, actually. We considered tons and tons of pricing schemes, and it was difficult to come up with a good one for personal users. That's something we mean to address in the future though, but I imagine it won't be a pay-per- build option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work at 2600hz and I'm the head of marketing so I feel pretty comfortable chiming in here :).

>When did people start paying for your SaaS?

I think the earliest indicator I had that people would pay for our product was when someone said "Wow" when they saw it. We started the company out as a consulting venture because we couldn't raise VC money. The launch of the SaaS platform coincided with the V2 of our GUI, and so we had a strong indication from the consulting that folks would pay, but it was quite relieving to actually see dollars coming in to our coffers.

>How many times did it take before you got it right?

I think it's honestly still a work in progress. The first time I felt ok about asking someone to pay for our product was when I was comfortable using it myself and when I could see real value when positioning it to people. This was roughly a year after I started (I'm in my 3rd year now) because we didn't get it right on the first iteration at all.

>What works for traction?

Content. We started doing Expert Q&A sessions that attract a lot of attendance, but they're active traffic acquisition channels for us. Each presentation nets about 1000 views a month right now, so there's a lot of value in continuing to develop that kind of high-quality content. I think people in your industry value expert commentary, so if you're in a position to provide it, do it. (We are at $X,000,000 in revenue in a little over 3 years, bootstrapped, so I know it can be done).

>What promos work?

Promos usually don't work. We're not in PayPal land where your cost of acquisition can be $20 per customer. That's insane. What works now is great content, syndicated effectively.

>What marketing tactics?

1) Great content

2) Speak at conferences

3) Charity (Not because it's going to pay you back, but because people love the things you're passionate about)

I think the best promotion/marketing advice I can give you is to be passionate about what you do and represent that passion with class. That's the ticket to success, in any walk of life :).

TL;DR: Content Marketing + Syndication. People will buy your SaaS when it solves a problem you yourself experience daily.

<comment><USER15> I don't know a ton about your industry, but why can't you spend $20 per customer? I can't imagine your clv is lower than that. Or are you saying you wish you only had to spend that much?

<comment><USER3> _why can 't you spend $20 per customer?_

Because the cost per click is roughly $X0, and (to put it mildly), a click is not a 100% guarantee that someone will buy a phone system.

<comment><USER15> Ok, then I misunderstood the comment. I was thinking they were saying $20 was too much to spend, not that they wish they could get away with only spending $20 per acquistion. Thanks for clarifying!

<comment><USER14> PayPal's model was "signup get $10 oh and for everyone you refer we'll give them $10 and you $10". Which is all well and good when you've got venture financing and a land grab market, but we aren't in that market and we don't have that financing.

If I could pay $20 and be 100% sure I'd get a new customer, hell, if I could pay $500, I'd do it every time. You can find marketing channels like that, but finding the repeatable marketing channels of that nature is the gold mine hunting of marketing. When you find the repeatable channels, your viral channels, that's when your pour on the gas.

Hope that helps :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I first started goodnights [http://www.goodnights.me](http://www.goodnights.me) & [http://www.guestmanager.com](http://www.guestmanager.com) I had a grand vision to take on a huge goliath, raise money, get employees, yada yada, the whole "start up dream". The product took many turns, adapting to customer demands.

After realizing event ticketing is quite the classic commodity, I asked myself, how can I differentiate my offering? I can't compete on features, service fee kickbacks, venue relationships, etc. So I built a guestlist component and targeted it directly for nightclubs. And so, after a couple failed fundings, working with crap people, I had a great product, a couple loyal customers, poor marketing. I've spent (am spending) tons of time to clean up the company (get it down to just me, no overhead, etc) - I've dropped the whole 'startup thing', now I'm building a SaaS company for myself & my customers, and see where it will take me. I prefer the freedom and debt-free lifestyle of living that it affords me, over being a CEO of some venture funded company.

But to really answer your question, I got my first (SaaS) customer by hanging out every night at nightclubs, getting a couple people to evangelize using my software through the beta's. Once it was good enough, such that I didn't have to do anything for the club to operate itself, I went to another nightclub and just sold them on it. It wasn't that hard because the product is good. The clinching feature in my case is the ability to add a guest to the iPad via SMS - promoters love that. Now I am trying to figure out how to scale up my efforts, see if any partnerships make sense, maybe move geographically (I'm in Vancouver, but American)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, sounds like quite the experience. Seems like your in a good place now... so quick to squash any interpretations of being a canadian, eh?! haha Thanks for sharing and good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org) was running as a free, no-signup-required ad-hoc currency API for about 8 months before a friend of mine kicked my ass and made me install a signup. I spent months playing with PayPal, test accounts, sandboxes, writing features nobody has yet used - but ultimately, when I put a "pay now" button on, I got my first subscriber the same day.

The old advice rings true: the hardest thing was asking for money. People were happier to pay than get it for free, because it ensured this service they needed and loved would still be around, and its developer could eat :)

The service really only grew thanks to the feedback of those early (and future) paying customers, too. They have asked the hardest questions, requested the most useful features, etc. - that has shaped the product and business more than anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> I launched Planscope in February of 2012, and by the end of the first month, a little less than 30 people converted from a trial to a paid account, many of which are still around.

I credit a pretty aggressive campaign of relentlessly understanding my first batch of announcement customers businesses, their needs, and what was keeping them from having an über-consulting business with the lack of crickets on launch day. Then again, I really didn't make launch day that big of a deal, outside of it being the first day I flipped the switch on the marketing site.

I'd have a LOT more customers if I knew what I know today about why people buy / don't buy project management software, and I likely would have focused first on audience building over building a SaaS. But that's sort of the point, right? Get something out there that people pay for, figure out why people are buying and why (more) people aren't, and continuously improve on that. So it's not as much of a Eureka moment that suddenly made Planscope take off as it was a lot of shots fired in a dark room, and inching up the brightness with each subsequent shot.

One thing that has worked really well for me: Gaining a customer through something other than my SaaS. I sell books, workshops, host a newsletter and podcast, etc. All of these are focused on making some component of a consulting business better. Planscope also helps better a few select parts of a consulting business, but has considerably higher adoption friction than a book purchase (e.g. ditching your current PM software and convincing yourself, your team, and your clients to shift somewhere else is _not an easy task_.)

So after someone's "entered my ecosystem" and started getting value from me through information, there's a good chance they'll discover Planscope, and by then they'll be familiar with my consulting philosophy and have enough trust placed in me to adopt my SaaS (there's more than a good chance, actually — there are autoresponders in place to ensure it.)

And the proof is in the last few months of signups: more than 60% of all new accounts come from my newsletter or have read one or more of my books, and the overwhelming majority of support requests start with "Hey Brennan" :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> It took a while. We went from 0 to $100k in a year - with $500k before year 2, but we're SaaS for SMB's within a well defined niche. It was a long hard slog of pitches, demos, and conferences. I've since left as CTO because I didn't want to be in the niche we needed to pivot to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Incredible! What did you find was the best way to access the decision makers in your niche? Sounds like you contacted them directly and met with them, but what type of marketing/promo did you do? Seems like your SaaS hit a tipping point somewhere between year 1 and 2 and really caught fire?

<comment><USER9> For revenue specifically - we built it to sell from the outset (A book called "Built to sell" where the author speaks on Mixergy is a good primer). Specifically, we priced high (base package was $150/mo), recurring revenue (SaaS), focused on a few pains until we found the biggest one, only contacted clients that had large bases (eg: 1 decision maker could purchase it for 30 franchises), and marketed and spoke directly with the decision makers. (Getting in front of them in their offices and at conferences,and doing "gratis" learning sessions at one of their locations.) For meeting the decision makers - we found one influential person at a well known industry client, and give it to them for 80% off for few months and worked out the bugs. Then we leveraged them as social proof to go to the larger clients. Then the smaller guys will see the larger players using it, and follow suit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic! Congrats, I think I'll pick up that read as well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When?

Year 1 - 5 figures Year 2 - 6 figures Year 4 - 7 figures

Why? We knew the industry and knew the problems before we started. We had someone nearby who was desperate for a solution and confirmed they were willing to pay the high rate we were looking for. Technically, we had an interest in the types of technical problems they had and had spent years playing in those areas on side projects.

While working on an MVP we continued selling the vision to other prospects using nothing but balls and a PowerPoint presentation. We landed a second customer for year one and worked hard to keep them happy. Our MVP was barely that and we iterated based on the feedback we got from the first two customers.

Our fee structure puts us in a position where we only make money when our customers do. That makes it very easy to prioritize features based on how valuable they will be to our customers. This creates a nice tight feedback loop. When combined with our fanatical customer support, we have many die hard fans who do a lot of marketing for us in an industry where many of the prospects are good friends with each other and use trade shows as a chance to get together and drink with old friends and brag about the cool stuff they are using to help them with their business.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've launched a few different businesses, two SaaS business and one software product.

In all three cases people bought it on day one or the first day after the trial expired. The first SaaS business I just posted on a few forums to come check us out. I was shocked when people purchased a yearly plan when we were still very much in beta.

However, it took two years before it started taking off, and then it suddenly did take off due to word of mouth. That was great, but also a double edged sword. Once better funded competitors arrived in the market, word of mouth went to them, and our sign-ups started to drop off.

To counter it, we did competitive upgrades. That was really our most successful campaign though it only worked online. We did advertise it in magazines but few people every signed up because of it.

With my latest SaaS, we had access to a huge opt-in email list. Lots of sign- ups on day one, and quite a few converted to paying customers once the trial ended. That said, having now done that for a year, we're still experimenting with different pricing and feature options.

I think the key to a successful SaaS business is to really understand your lifetime values, and how churn affects it. It can really help you define a successful marketing campaign.

Every model I've ever run on digital marketing shows that it will take approximately 5 to 12 months for it to start paying off. Add in your other overhead and it takes 2 years before you really start making money. But at that point, you will start making serious money.

To summarize, the most effective marketing tactics I've used are:

\- competitive upgrades \- referrals credits \- e-mail marketing \- white label branding of the same service with a major player in your industry (yes, you'll cannibalize some of your other sales but can be worth it) \- google adwords

Once they are in, try to quickly onboard them. Once people start deriving value, churn decreases significantly.

<comment><USER19> I want to add that we religiously use a format outlined here (also mentioned in the Constant Contact video):

[http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas- metrics/](http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I launched my first SaaS ([https://www.wisecashhq.com](https://www.wisecashhq.com) \- cash flow forecasting for freelancers and SBOs) in private beta one year ago.

I enabled the (upfront) paywall a couple of weeks ago and have currently 15 or so paying customers (the early adopters got a 20% lifetime discount).

For marketing, I'm going to use twitter, useful blog posts (educational, howtos) related to cashflow AND how to start your own SaaS successfully.

In terms of getting traction, I think that putting a very basic landing page a year and a half ago helped me get traction - I mentioned the product quite often on twitter while working on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Same thing I've been doing with mine ([http://sociostock.com](http://sociostock.com)) with regards to the lander. I've reviewed some landing page debates from the likes of 37signals, but was curious as to how often you altered your design and the effect it had on signups/conversions?

<comment><USER21> do you plan to use stocktwits.com for feed ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered it. Looking around for some other options, or considering doing something organic with streaming api. Have any suggestions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I launched [http://marrily.com](http://marrily.com) early December 2011, and within a few days I had the first sign up. I didn't advertise at all but had a soft-launch on HackerNews. Since then Marrily got mentioned on a few magazines (Brides, and NYMag) and totally via organic sources (they found me and reached out). I did a bunch of give-aways and sponsored-posts too. Building partnership is important since it creates endorsements and synergies. Depends on the industry, but for wedding in particular, traditional prints still give very good results. Even 6 months after the printed article on NYMag, I still have vendors contacting me for partnerships and new customers signing up via that source.

My current pending failure is that I haven't made much progress since the launch but ended up getting a full time job for a while to rebuild my savings. I spent all my money working/not-working on Marrily and I was pretty broke when I started working again. I'm not giving up, but more or less spend some time to grow personally and professionally so when I resume, it will be another exciting stage of the journey.

BTW, Rob Walling's interview in babuskov's comment is really good, full of food for thoughts.

<comment><USER23> That looks like a cool app! I'd use it if I wasn't already married.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I run [http://letscodejavascript.com](http://letscodejavascript.com), which is a screencast for professional JavaScript developers. It's not exactly a SaaS, but as a subscription business, it runs on the same fundamentals: rate of acquisition, churn, customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, etc. We have X00 subscribers and gross low six figures. The show is bootstrapped and profitable, but not yet enough of a success to allow me to hire additional employees. I launched five months ago, at the beginning of February.

> When did people start paying for your SaaS?

I launched on Kickstarter, so in a sense, people started paying right away. There were two pivotal moments in the Kickstarter: First, I got a nice bump from posting it here on HN[1]. Second, I sent announcements out to a bunch of JavaScript blogs and newsletters. The only one that posted about it was JavaScript Weekly, but that led to a _lot_ of people backing the project, and that led to an additional surge of publicity and backers. Part of the reason JS Weekly posted the project was because it was already successful, thanks in part to the HN surge, so there was this definite sense of success leading to success.

When I launched to the public, the series had already been airing to KS backers for about seven months. I had been collecting email addresses the whole time from people who wanted to subscribe but missed the Kickstarter, and I had somewhere north of 1,000 addresses by the time I went public. So I sent out three "you can subscribe now" emails to that group, over the course of a month, and got a large number subscribers as a result. One of those people posted to HN[2], which led to about 70 more new subscriptions, and JS Weekly posted about the announcement as well.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977240)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977240)

> How many times did it take before you got it right?

This particular venture was a modest success from the beginning, but I'm still working on getting it right. :-) I have a pretty compelling product (based on subscriber feedback), and it's profitable, but I think it could be a lot more successful than it is.

However, this is the latest attempt out of several to launch a SaaS business. The rest were all complete failures, in that they never generated a dime.

> What have been the biggest factors in your success in terms of gaining > traction with your SaaS?

1\. Let's Code JavaScript is based on a similar screencast I produced for free on YouTube[3]. That screencast was done as an experiment, but it got pretty good traction. So one smart thing I did was to recognize the appeal of the format and turn it into a subscription product.

2\. The timing was right. JavaScript is essential to the web, and increasing numbers of people are dealing with large codebases that need serious software engineering. I'm filling a significant need that a lot of programmers are facing.

3\. I'm well known in the Agile community and already have a decent following. That provided the "seed capital" to make the Kickstarter successful--and as I said before, success has bred success. It's also made it much easier to get the word out once I opened the show to the public.

4\. Posting to twitter, then my blog[4], then Kickstarter, allowed me to conduct a series of low-cost market tests and fine-tune my pitch. The Kickstarter took a surprising amount of effort, but it was all focused on the market. Building the market first and the product second was a great experience, especially compared to previous product attempts, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[3] [http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets- Play/](http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets-Play/)

[4] [http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Proposing-Test-Driven- Javascr...](http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Proposing-Test-Driven-Javascript- Screencast.html)

> In particular, what marketing/promo tactics have served you best?

1\. My existing network and reputation.

2\. The copy on the Kickstarter page resonated with people[5], and I've gotten a lot of compliments on the demo video[6]. Both of these reinforce the existing need people have for professional JavaScript.

3\. Being linked on news sites (such as HN and JS Weekly) and link aggregators (such as [7] and [8]).

I wouldn't say that I've found the "right" marketing and promo tactics yet, though. I put a lot of effort into a "press tour" after the public launch in February. I spoke at a user group and several international conferences. It took a huge amount of effort (mostly because I had to pre-produce videos to air while I was away on those trips) and I can only point to eight subscriptions that directly resulted from those talks. I'm sure it helped raise awareness of the series, so it wasn't a total loss, but it seems pretty low bang-for-buck.

Next I'm going to focus on (free) content and in-bound marketing. I've always been good at this, so I have high hopes. My conversion numbers are very good, so if I can get more people to visit the site, I think I can go from "scraping by" to "major success." Time will tell.

[5] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/188988365/lets-code- test...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/188988365/lets-code-test-driven- javascript)

[6] [http://www.letscodejavascript.com/#demo](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/#demo)

[7] [http://pineapple.io/resources/lets-code- tdjs](http://pineapple.io/resources/lets-code-tdjs)

[8] [http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming- scr...](http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming-screencast- series)

I hope this helps! One last note: I found this video from Constant Contact about their experiences marketing their SaaS to be enlightening: [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman- constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant- contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

Good luck!

<comment><USER11> FWIW, I really enjoyed the KickStarter series (although I just finished up, got a bit behind). May re-sub at some point, right now I had enough trouble due to other projects to even finish the KS series.

<comment><USER24> Thanks! Your experience is pretty common, actually. I email everyone who cancels and ask them for feedback, and the vast majority say they liked the show but didn't have time to watch any more. That's probably the main thing I'll try to figure out when I start looking at improving my churn rate.

(Although I have no idea where to begin. Any ideas?)

<comment><USER25> > Although I have no idea where to begin. Any ideas?

No one has figured it out. Gamification, prizes, group work, classes w/ deadlines, charge by use rather than subscription. It's really a problem of commitment, whether it's learning or dieting or anything. We have 90% completion rates for courses for our corporate clients because employees are required to finish it. Without some external pressure it's hard to get people to do anything.

<comment><USER24> Interestingly, a lot of those techniques are extrinsic motivators, which studies have found to actually _reduce_ self-motivation.

(A classic book on the subject is Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards."[1] Dan Pink's TED talk[2] is a entertaining overview of the same concepts.)

That's not to say that I have any answers. But when I tackle the problem, I'll probably focus on intrinsic motivators (love of the material, sense of challenge, joy of solving problems, sense of mastery, etc.) rather than extrinsic motivators (badges, prizes, employer threats).

[1] [http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm](http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm)

[2] [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I founded [http://www.accountportal.com](http://www.accountportal.com) about 4 years back. We had our first paying subscribers within the first month, but growth over the first 12 months was very slow.

Things continued to grow at an moderately increasing rate after that. Our initial app was based on Adobe Flex (i.e. flash backend); worst decision ever. The iPad was released - initially we thought (hoped!) that the decision to not support flash would be overturned in time. After a few months it was clear that we had to change.

It took us 6 months to completely rewrite our app, during which time growth pretty much flat-lined. However, the rewrite was probably the best decision ever, since it has allowed us to move much faster then we ever could before, and subscription rates increased.

I'd say that it took us 3 years to get it "right". There are still loads of things we need to improve (product tours, engagement emails, etc), but we're getting there. Those first years were tough, and many times we thought of giving up. We're now doubling numbers every 12 months. We're up against some pretty huge competition, and those kind of growth rates suit us just fine given that we have always been 100% bootstrapped and that we're now cash positive.

The two biggest factors in gaining traction were: (i) Trying loads of different approaches. Different marketing channels, different prices, different emails, different anything. Having said that, we sometimes get some really weird stats coming through that have no rhyme or reason. Why is one month 3 times more subscribers than the previous month, and then back down again? Sometimes it just feels like a "roll of the dice". (ii) Not giving up. We were in the fortunate position of being able to stick it out for a long time (some may say longer than we should have). I sometime heard stuff like "good entrepreneurs know when to give up", and I'd guess that some (most?) would have in the same position as us after a year or two. The early years were an absolute slog - so be prepared to think in terms of years, not months.

</comment><comment><USER27> they never did. everyone said they would, but when push came to shove, no one.

<comment><AUTHOR> How many times did you try and in what markets?

<comment><USER27> associations, small businesses with 500+ employees, HR directors, etc. We tried for about 6 months.

<comment><USER18> I recommend aiming a little lower. Companies with 500 employees and HR departments already have a lot of structure and process around making purchases. There are lots of much smaller companies with lots of revenue and very large pain points that you could easily solve for them. It is much easier to talk directly to the decision makers of these companies and if you treat them well they will be your biggest fans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well, for [http://surveylitics.com](http://surveylitics.com), they haven't yet. ~50 people have registered for the free plan, or created a free survey, but no paid signups yet. The site's been up for a few months now.

I haven't done much marketing yet, though. Or reaching out to potential users or industries. Or really, any of the things that you're supposed to do... so it's nobody's fault but my own.

There are lots of great tips in this thread. I'll definitely be giving some of them a try.

</comment><comment><USER29> I see a lot of SaaS marketed directly at 'users' e.g. developers etc.

In 'enterprise' the person you need to be pitching is the CFO/FD - <USER2> finance teams see SaaS they love it - even if net it costs more than existing solutions over same period.

1) It helps to qualify/budget projects - splitting the service cost monthly by default

2) SaaS can be turned off - unlike massive cap-ex or long-term op-ex commitments

</comment><comment><USER30> I run [https://www.dozeo.com](https://www.dozeo.com), a online meeting tool, and we had 2 minor changes in our software. We listened to customers and coded what they wanted to have. A public API was our biggest move towards a bigger customer base... My guess is that everyone wants to build his own thing and we can provide them a good software...

</comment><comment><USER31> We started [http://wpoven.com](http://wpoven.com) , 2 weeks back , first signup was 3 days in.

We never did any launch page, pre launch advertising ( actually a mistake) etc. But we own some other sites where we placed our banners. A one to one chat helped us secure our first client.</comment>


Google Home now speaks Spanish - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/6/26/17505594/google-home-spanish-language-options-mexico-launch-spain-eeuu <comment><USER2> "If you already own a Google Home and want to change it to Spanish, you can do that by going into Assistant's settings on your phone, selecting your smart speaker in the "devices" menu, and then tapping on "Assistant language."

I simply want to say "Hola Google" and have it respond accordingly.</comment>


Vertical scalability is now available on Scalingo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scalingo.com/post/116471769863/introducing-vertical-scalability

<comment><USER2> Scalingo's CTO here, if you have any question, I'd be glad to answer them.</comment>


PCI Compliance - The Good, The Bad, and The Insecure - Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mavitunasecurity.com/blog/definitive-pci-dss-compliance-guide-web-application-security/ <comment><USER2> Salted SHA512 is _absolutely not_ a safe way to store authenticators for payment card information. Using salted hashes for payment cards is even worse than using it for passwords, because the input domain for payment card information is so much smaller.

If a pentester finds that you did that, you will almost certainly get that written up sev:hi.

We work with lots of companies that handle payment card information (though we do not do PCI audits, which are a race to the bottom). The best practice solution for this problem is to isolate the cardholder information on a protected backend machine, keep it encrypted, and replace it on every other machine with an opaque token.

(You are much better off using Stripe or Braintree than doing this yourself.)

<comment><USER3> > (You are much better off using Stripe or Braintree than doing this > yourself.)

Gonna throw in a recommendation for Spreedly ([http://spreedly.com](http://spreedly.com)) right here. It's a processor- agnostic payment vault, so that you can offload your card storage needs without having to commit to a processor for the life of your business.

Build against Spreedly and if you want to use Stripe today, and some new YC 2014 startup next year, you just change one line of code and you're done. If you store your customers' cards at your processor, you're locked in to that choice to various degrees (from having to request some kind of encrypted hand- over and re-implementing all your billing code, to having to ask every single customer to re-enter their billing info because you chose a processor that won't give you your information when you leave).

<comment><USER4> We're looking at spreedly right now. Do know if they use Hardware Security Modules? Working in E-commerce field i've seen some pretty bad "secure implementations" like storing all the credit card data in a separate database encrypted, but they put the private key into the code base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PCI is a bullshit standard anyways, in my opinion. Any standard that specifically states that the moment you are breached, you are "out of compliance" is a scam in my opinion. "If you follow this, then you'll be safe, but if you get breached, by default, you weren't in compliance". I'm not really sure who that protects, exactly. I hate it.

<comment><USER6> I agree a lot of is bullshit, but it doesn't say you're out of compliance when you're breached at all. It specifies that a compliance test is a point in time though, and being compliant doesn't mean that you're still compliant the next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I think that credit cards should use two factor authentication. Put an e-ink strip on the back of the card that displays a new 6 digit pin every 10 minutes or so. The pin would be required to complete in-person and online transaction.

Skimmers would become useless because the PIN number entered would only be good for a few minutes after it was captured. Stealing a credit card number and sharing online would be equally useless without the physical card.

This would, of course, cause some problems for online purchases, like Amazon's 1-click, but something like vendor-specific passcodes could solve that. You could go to your credit card website and request a passcode to provide to a specific online store. If their database gets compromised, you can revoke the password.

<comment><USER8> > vendor-specific passcodes could solve that. You could go to your credit card > website and request a passcode to provide to a specific online store. If > their database gets compromised, you can revoke the password.

If it's vendor specific then it shouldn't matter if anyone else has it. Only that vendor should be able to use it. If that's not possible then if their database gets compromised, _the vendor_ should be able to invalidate their password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> PCI standard is the _minimum_ requirement. In my experience, people don't really think about security and PCI at least forces them to think and ask questions. From this perspective, PCI is actually doing its job.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that there is no transparency to the end user (customer). As stated previously PCI is a barebones set of recommendations that doesn't make any commitments to a real world security model at all. Instead it is more of a revenue model than a tool that helps offset risk for businesses. All of the audit and products built around it are mostly as valuable as PCI itself.

If PCI were to be revamped an actual assessment which graded real-world efficacy would be transparent to the customer prior to purchase. Real-world efficacy is the hard part, as it is not a static of any sort.

TL;DR Businesses are bound by process and governance. Attackers are not. If you use PCI as a driver for security implementation you will fail. PCI 'compliance' continues to be a fallacy of warm and fuzzy security kittens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just as a quick aside: PCI compliance is a huge (mandatory) motivation that fuels much of the information security industry. While I'm careful not to "bite the hand that feeds," there is a large gap between being PCI compliant and being in any way secure. For those that are interested, hacker/security conferences such as DEF CON, Black Hat, ShmooCon, etc. regularly have interesting presentations on completely owning PCI compliant networks.

<comment><USER12> There is a difference between building a network that is built to pass a PCI Compliance test and building a network that can pass PCI's SAQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> PCI compliance is actually there because the card industry uses 1970 style security. Fact is the ATM cryptos was broken in the 1990s and it is more expensive to change all the card terminals than compensate the customers for fraud.

Most broken is the fact that US credit cards still uses magnetic stripe when everyone else have converted to using smart card chips. Why the is there visible PAN numbers on the cards and magnetic stripes this is year 2013.

Fact card companies uses broken security mechanisms on the cards. Then everybody else have to comply with PCI because their broken security.

<comment><USER14> What's the alternative to not having a readable number on the card when I want to purchase something online?

<comment><USER15> Your bank could issue "virtual credit cards" [or debit cards] that provide you with the cleartext card number and verification code.

Some banks already provide this service.[0]

The other alternative would be to buy a compatible smart-card reader.

[0]: [https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts- cards/shopsaf...](https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts- cards/shopsafe.go)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ken Cochrane has a really good guide to PCI compliance from a developer's standpoint. The main point that it drives home, though, is that you really don't want to ever be in a position where you could be touching card-level data. You want to hand that off to Stripe, Braintree, Balanced, PayPal, _someone_ else before it hits your server.

[http://kencochrane.net/blog/2012/01/developers-guide-to- pci-...](http://kencochrane.net/blog/2012/01/developers-guide-to-pci- compliant-web-applications/)

</comment><comment><USER12> PCI-DSS is a great tool to get management to understand what sort of security is required to handle customer's data properly. It's not meant to be a handbook for security experts to tick off a bunch of boxes and act like they are Neo with Kung-Fu.

If you have ever been in a meeting and been face to face with the blank stares of management while you explain why you need to spend time on hardening your servers or software, you would be thankful that PCI exists.

</comment><comment><USER17> The way I read the standard, the string 'soccer1' is a valid/compliant PCI password. At least it for PCI-DSS v2.

8.5.10 Require a minimum password length of at least seven characters.

8.5.11 Use passwords containing both numeric and alphabetic characters.

In fact, the string 'password1' exceeds the requirements.

</comment><comment><USER18> PCI = peripheral component interconnect? I don't get it.

<comment><USER19> Comments like this make it really tough for me to not post a snarky lmgtfy link.

edit: Seriously people, it's the first result for "pci" on google. Even when not spelled all caps. Come on.

<comment><USER20> It may be your first result on google, but thanks to individualized filtering and filter bubbles [1] there is no way to tell what the first result will be for someone else.

[1] [http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted- talk](http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> about encrypting the card data, can't you encrypt with an RSA public key and store the private key off-site? I thought it also worked backwards like that.

<comment><USER22> Yes, at a former job that was exactly how we did it in our point-of-sale software. The software had the public key and could do a one-way encryption of the data for temporary storage on disk if the network was down. The private key only existed on a server we controlled.</comment></comment>


Film Crit Hulk Smash: ON DESPAIR, GAMERGATE AND QUITTING THE HULK - <AUTHOR> http://badassdigest.com/2014/10/27/film-crit-hulk-smash-on-despair-gamergate-and-quitting-the-hulk/

<comment><USER2> great article. i still have no idea what gamergate is about but it was really amazing how hulk could read the hearts of all those people who said what gamergate meant to them, and then correct them.</comment>


Show HN: One Click Shrug Emoji Copy - <AUTHOR> https://copyshrugemoji.com <comment><USER2> I did this years ago with [http://shrugdude.com/](http://shrugdude.com/) and look ma, no ads.

<comment><USER3> I didn't even realise there were ads on it. uBlock for the win!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's not an emoji.

Otherwise I think these are oddly a good idea. I used to make frequent use of unicodesnowmanforyou.com to get my snowman emojis (I'd add one but hn does not permit). Would hardly be able to justify the domain registration expense though.

<comment><USER5> That is absolutely an emoji. The term predates their inclusion in Unicode.

<comment><USER6> I believe these text based characters are called emoticons whereas an emoji is an image.

<comment><USER5> Well, then I was absolutely wrong.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER7> I believe you did that on purpose, good sir, so you had an excuse to shrug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate to break it to you, but this has already been done, and more extensively too: [https://textfac.es](https://textfac.es)

<comment><USER9> I find [http://dongerlist.com/](http://dongerlist.com/) a much better resource

<comment><USER10> I honestly thinks that the CIA's own list ([https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_17760284.html](https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_17760284.html)) is the best one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Had I not set up a keyboard shortcut for this a week ago, I would've been using your site at least a dozen times a day.

Clean and functional. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I got tired of googling it every time, and was annoyed I had to fumble around with manual copy and paste on my iphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's official: HN has become completely reduced to reddit

<comment><USER13> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, cool advertisements. I'm glad they made an impression on me.

<comment><USER15> What advertisements? I don't see any.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> On both Mac and iPhone I've set &shrug to convert to ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I use it all the time.

<comment><USER17> I'm using word "dunno" for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Look of Disapproval is a Chrome extension (not mine) featuring multiple Unicode reactions, all of them disappointed.

¯\\(°_o)/¯

</comment><comment><USER19> Slight variation: we can sub "shi" for "tsu" for a different look. Also, hiragana "ji", preceded by an extra dakuten mark:

Original: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

s/ツ/シ/: ¯\\_(シ)_/¯

s/ツ/゛じ/: ¯\\_(゛じ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER20> I keep this and ascii nyan-cat at the bottom of my todo.txt file that's always open as the first tab in a sublime window, so I get it by

cmd+tab cmd+1 cmd+f '\\_'cmd+left shift+cmd+right cmd+c

Which seems like a lot of keypresses, but being entirely keyboard and mostly cmd, it's surprisingly muscle-memory friendly.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do you really need so many calls to external domains, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, just to let me copy a couple of characters? This looks like it was built and posted here just to cheaply harvest a couple of ad impressions.

</comment><comment><USER22> For the Alfred users out there, this [1] workflow gives you this and a handful of other kaomoji with a single chord

[1]: [https://github.com/luxflux/alfred- workflows](https://github.com/luxflux/alfred-workflows)

</comment><comment><USER23> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ brings back memories of SeleCT and Starcraft 2's early days. sup son?

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool idea!

I'm not sure I could use it. The paranoid part of me will always imagine it copying 'rm -rf /' and me accidentally pasting that into a terminal one day

<comment><USER13> Don't a lot of systems have built in protection against that now so that a user is forced to confirm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://textfac.es](https://textfac.es) is my favourite version of this

</comment><comment><USER26> FYI: The Google keyboard for iOS automatically suggests this emoticon when you type "Shrug" (sans quotes obvs)

</comment><comment> tek-cyb-org -\\_(">)_/\- ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER27> Does one thing and does it well

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Check your twitter share link, Its not including the site url.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh, seems fine. I get:

Copy the Shrug Emoji ‾\\_(ツ)_/‾ [https://copyshrugemoji.com/](https://copyshrugemoji.com/)

Then I tweet it to twitter and can click through fine. What OS/browser are you on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER30> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER31> I really miss my APL terminal....¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment></comment>


Hotel CEO celebrates higher prices in NYC after anti-Airbnb law passes - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/26/hotel-executive-openly-celebrates-higher-prices-after-anti-airbnb-law-passes/ <comment><USER2> I love AirBnB, and have used them many times. But in the case of NYC, AirBnB brought this wholly on themselves.

They knew landlords were running whole buildings in nyc as pseudo hotels, and they did little until now. [1]

They knew individuals were renting whole apartments 100% of the time, and did nothing.[2]

They refused to give data to the attorney general, and instead, mounted an AD campaign.[3]

Only after they were harshly penalized, did they promise to clamp down on the actual abuses.[4]

So they willingly let their customers break the law, because nyc is their biggest market, and well, now want to play the victim.

The spirit of AirBnB and the "sharing" economy is to share under utilized housing. Not to create illegal hotels.

[1] [http://gothamist.com/2014/10/16/airbnb_illegal_rapacious.php](http://gothamist.com/2014/10/16/airbnb_illegal_rapacious.php)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-07/wooing- go...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-07/wooing-governor- cuomo-airbnb-boots-2-233-new-york-city-listings)

[3] [http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-refuses-to-give- user-d...](http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-refuses-to-give-user-data-to- attorney-general-2013-10) [4][http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/technology/airbnb- proposes...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/technology/airbnb-proposes- cracking-down-on-new-york-city-hosts.html)

<comment><USER3> >They knew individuals were renting whole apartments 100% of the time, and did nothing.

While this certainly goes against the spirit of Airbnb and probably against their terms and conditions, if there is demand for this kind of short rentals, why wouldn't they be allowed?

(Not directly replying to your comment, just opening up a related discussion)

EDIT: linkregister's comment addresses the issue [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800412)

<comment><USER4> Exactly. The market is filling a niche here and it seems the only response is that "it's wrong because the rules say it's wrong".

<comment><USER5> Good things:

\- Makes visiting the city cheaper

\- Increases tourism

\- Enriches land-owners

Bad things:

\- Skirts consumer protection laws

\- Makes it harder for law-abiding hotels to survive in that situation

\- Reduces inventory of rental units on the market, driving up local prices in an already expensive place

\- People in a "hotel room" are more likely to misbehave than someone that actually intends to live somewhere

It's not wrong just because it's illegal, it's wrong because it causes various problems in the city and for the people that live there.

<comment><USER6> If it's not wrong for being illegal, I wouldn't argue that law abiding hotels especially deserve to stay in business.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. It's like the argument "because it's against the law, it's fundamentally bad."

Just take a look at dealership laws. Do you really think those laws are there to protect consumers? Or do they merely protect the incumbents which helped push for the laws?

And now we're forced to buy used cars from sleazy middlemen because they have a legislated monopoly. Good thing those laws are there to protect us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Higher hotel prices are not necessarily bad, especially for the local residents.

I had an Airbnb spawn across the mews behind my building they have a pretty large open balcony and there were parties literally every night during the summer here in London, they stopped only fairly recently when the season changed and I'm expecting the hell to resume when we get closer to the holiday season.

Across the street on the front of my building there is a pretty nice hotel (actually there are a few of them on the street and around it) and they are quiet because the hotel staff keeps the guests behaved. After 10 PM you'll see the porter or the front desk telling guests to be quiet even if they are talking on their phone a tad too loud while having a smoke.

And as far as calling the cops goes, this doesn't work, noise complaints especially on the weekend are pretty low priority I'm hardly the only one bothered by it and it's pretty futile.

Before that there were about 3-4 weeks of an Airbnb in my actual building, it's a small mid 19th century building with only 6 flats and there were tons of complaints including loss of mail and packages so the trust that owns the building had a vote and banned short term rental.

<comment><USER8> I'm in a similar position - I live in a 19th century ten-flat building, all privately owned. We had one flat rented out all summer on Airbnb and it turned me from being 'meh' about the idea to being totally against it.

None of the other owners/residents were consulted or told about the Airbnb, so the first thing I knew was a group of Germans at my door asking me questions about their stay, and whether I could give them a bottle of olive oil. Fortunately for them I was bemused enough to help them out rather than to think "well no, I've been at work all day, and nobody's paying me to be your concierge".

Then there was a family who stood in the communal, enclosed hallway and smoked every night. And the group who partied until 3am all week; and people who slammed the main door rather than closing it gently (it's old and a bit fragile).

I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better. And the people who rented out their flat are really nice (I'm otherwise on good terms with them). So it's hard to blame anyone but Airbnb and their business model.

This isn't what I signed up for when I bought my home; I want to live among a community of neighbours, not in a cheap hotel run for the benefit of others.

<comment><USER9> > I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and > knew no better.

It's fair to blame them, though. We all know Airbnbs are rented out by real people in residential buildings, with real neighbors. It's basic etiquette to treat the apartment as if it were your own and respect the people around you, no matter how much you're paying for it (and Airbnbs aren't always that much cheaper than hotels). I've stayed at a few Airbnbs and that has always been my #1 concern.

Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.

<comment><USER7> >Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.

That would take effort, most hosts won't do it and Airbnb won't do it because they would be told to go and lick a power socket by most buildings.

Having a revolving door in a small building without a porter isn't nice, noise, loss of security and theft can be a real problem.

The building getting 1% (per falt) out of the stay is really honestly nothing say you have some really nice flat to rent and you rent it for 600 a week, do you think anyone would accept this nonsense for the price of a coffee and a muffin at Starbucks?

Even if they manage to have 100% tenancy it will mean that each flat will see about 300GBP, sure no one will throw away 300GBP but this is likely less than 1 week of rent for most decent locations in London this isn't what is going to make the difference.

Zoning laws and regulations exist for a reason, sure you can have a building with a bad tenant but this is a single point issue which can be resolved through the police, council or the building trust.

And while not to sound too obnoxious when you are paying a premium for the location and accommodation you expect a certain demographic whether it's young professionals or more established families it doesn't matter, you don't expect 7 drunk dutch girls partying all day and all night that is for sure.

Sure 10 or even 5 years ago I might have liked it, but not now, I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to live in what effectively can become a hostel come summer just because people can now pay for the upgrade to first class with Airbnb.

I also don't think it's unreasonable to think that people should not be allowed to effectively build purposely built party flats with a huge bar in the living room and a balcony which was turned from a picnic table and a few benches into a dance floor just so they can ask for double the price while advertising it on ABNB or w/e.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this law problematic because it was written to make enforcement easy, not to address actual issues with serial short-term renting. The intent of the law was to bring serial short-term rented units back into the market for long- term renters. The intended outcome was to make more housing available for prospective renters and to reduce nuisances involved with serial short-term renters.

The outcome is to further sclerotize and limit the rental market. Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a company in the city. Now a couple can't rent out their apartment for the week while they go to Disneyworld.

To some degree I have fallen for the populist message in this article; the hoteliers are clearly reaping the most benefits from this legislation. However, in the long term, everyone in the city is harmed by unnecessarily restrictive laws.

The outcome is going to be a drive of this activity underground, as we have seen in alcohol prohibition and the formerly wild west of off-meter (or "gypsy") cabs in NYC. At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path.

Airbnb's failure was twofold: that of not spending as much capital and time as Uber/Lyft in changing the minds of lawmakers; and failing to address the targets of the legislation: serial short-term landlords. If Airbnb had addressed this issue, the hoteliers would not have had an argument for the public benefit.

<comment><USER11> > Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while > out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a > company in the city

Incorrect. Sublets of 30 days or more are still legal, as they have been forever, and in fact are highly protected under NYC rent law, which requires landlords to allow sublets.

So your narrative is fiction. The law, which existed before the founding of Airbnb, and subsequent flaunting thereof, prohibits short term transient rentals. The only recent change is the prohibition on actively soliciting this illegal activity, not the already-illegal activity itself, thus making enforcement easier.

We can have a healthy debate about the short term sublet laws. Many NYC residents, myself included, will support the ban on transient rentals and improvised hotel arrangements, because it has severe negative externalities to other residents of the buildings in question, negatively affects the rental market, and violates community principles of land use and zoning.

Others, perhaps including yourself, will take the opposite view. And via democracy, following that debate, the law against short term subletting can be amended or retained. Needless to say if you're promulgating these views from San Francisco your preferences on the matter will be disregarded.

The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I didn't remember the amount of days right; I thought it was a ban on longer rentals also. I'm glad that sublets aren't affected; that significantly changes my perspective on the law. It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model but changes nothing for preexisting common arrangements, such as month- long sublets. I appreciate your response.

> The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon > Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has > proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.

I think the outcome is a bit more nuanced than that. The lesson to be learned in this situation is that Airbnb provided terrible curation of its service while being instrumental in renters breaking the law. I don't think it's universally a bad idea to break laws one doesn't agree with, especially if they carried no significant consequences for all stakeholders involved.

Because Airbnb failed at its curation, the state of New York added teeth to the existing law. I still maintain that the primary use case for Airbnb, the sporadic rental, is a useful one for both guests and owners. The Airbnb rentals I've used in the past were mutually beneficial. Maybe I'm an outlier because I used the rental for non-malicious purposes.

<comment><USER12> As I read it, there's a point you made in the final paragraph that is kind of missed in the first paragraph.

> the state of New York added teeth to the existing law

> It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model

The rentals that AirBnB was listing that are illegal now were illegal before. The business model was predicated on that the fines were less than the cost of doing business illegally that AirBnB facilitated.

As I understand it, it shifted the scales to making fines more expensive, but that AirBnB in NYC was not necessarily a valid business model _before_ the adding of teeth.

<comment><USER10> The business model priced in the risk of fines and the amount under the old regime; it was profitable. Now all the city has to do is scrape the frontend (or API, if there is one) and tally up the fines.

Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER12> The distinction I was trying to make was "facilitating illegal activities and snubbing those charged with enforcement is not a viable business model."

The risk / reward of fines isn't AirBnB's model, but rather the calculation of the people and landlords offering rentals and _their_ business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course a hotel CEO will celebrate an anti-AirBnb law, and of course the Airbnb CEO will celebrate an anti-hotel law. That doesn't make either one a bad law. The law is supposed to serve the best interest of the public, and yes, someone will benefit and be happy about that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm sure the hotels will charge as much as possible, but since they pay taxes that assumably (since it was illegal) AirBnB hosts didn't, sounds like a win for the City Government of NY.

Just an observation, I don't really have much of an opinion either way. I currently live next to a couple resory rentals and depending on the people it can be between "not noticeable" and "Holy crap, I wish those drunk idiots would shut up and go to bed". Since there are multiple issues on all sides, they might need some zoning for "short-stay resort" dwellings, so people can choose to live in a possible party place or not. Might also give renters some piece of mind, ala the A ratings restaurants have to post.

<comment><USER15> What happens if your long term neighbors are drunk idiots? I fail to see how term length is relevant since it's not like neighbors vet new long term tenants for alcoholism and IQ.

<comment><USER16> This is something some people don't understand. Gentrification and things like it aren't only a racial issue. Sometimes you move into an area simply because the unemployed drunks and drug addicts can't afford to move there with you. I know I felt relief moving out of an all white trailer park into a suburban neighborhood. Nothing is worse that neighbors who have nothing to do all day but make noise.

<comment><USER17> Well, one could argue that automating away the jobs and producing those Unemployeds and then complaining about them, constitutes as worser. But i understand your point of view, i helped a friend to move out of a flat that was near a living complex mainly inhabited by collaps-cascading community members.

Anyway, constructive criticism, how to prevent such self-destruction? Boarding schools for ghetto children, to avoid prolonged contact with negative examples and behavior?

<comment><USER18> There's lots of solutions: 1) forcibly sterilize poorer people so they can't have children 2) ban poorer people from raising their own children, and instead seize them and have the State raise them in institutions (like in "Brave New World") 3) boarding schools for poorer children (you mentioned this) 4) send poorer people to re-education camps to teach the "positive" behaviors and values

Obviously, these solutions are not very palatable to most people. If you want solutions which aren't severe human-rights violations, there really aren't any, except subtle, long-term things such as maybe taking control of popular media and using it to slowly indoctrinate the population into "desirable" behaviors and values.

<comment><USER17> Ah, the merry go round of crime and shame has reached the high point, where all the previous attempts are completely forgotten and requested anew. Three generations, and all the memory is gone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations)

Boarding schools would have to be voluntarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is one CEO with one 800 bed hotel and 3 < 200 bed hotels speaking this way.

As a NYC resident, we don't want transients living in our buildings. There are safety issues for children, the elderly, an women, as well as potential theft. Many buildings are doormen to keep transients out.

There are $60 hotel rooms in Union City, NJ (according to Priceline) which is about 15 minutes by transit away from Times Square, the center of tourism in NYC. These Union City hotel rooms are closer to Times Square than a number of NYC hotels.

<comment><USER20> There are far better arguments to make than "good lord, the women and children!"

<comment><USER21> There are far worse arguments, as well.

"I want my kids to be safe" isn't _automatically_ a bad argument.

<comment><USER20> I guess I'm just cynical of this since it's usually baseless fearmongering. Has there been evidence of serious problems with this? I haven't seen any but I also haven't gone looking either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't like the image of AirBnb. They seem to think they can do whatever they like and get away with, like they should get special treatment because they are billionaires. I'm honestly happy to see them get crushed by the US government. It's good to see them put in their place. Just like how the US government did with MSFT back in the late 90s

<comment><USER18> This is one of those comments where I'm really not sure if you're being sarcastic, or you actually believe this (because I've exchanged messages with people on boards like this one who honestly believed the US government "put MSFT in their place" with the 90s trial).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reading these comments reminds me of the AirBnB ad I saw on twitter. Clicked through and sure enough, every single response was railing against AirBnB. Had a good chuckle at how AirBnB paid for an ad-hoc localized forum for people to complain about them.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd rather have insignificantly higher hotel prices and lower housing prices. It's a fair trade off.

<comment><USER25> OK, but this article is talking about significantly higher hotel prices ("big boost in the arm"), while any estimate of the fraction of housing units allocated to airbnb implies insignificantly lower housing prices, so your desired tradeoff is not happening.

<comment><USER26> I mean this just became law. Shouldn't we wait a bit for things to shake out before taking such hardliner stances?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems desirable from the perspective of NYC renters. Supply will shift from the hotel market to the long term rental market which should lower rent prices.

</comment><comment><USER28> Meanwhile, renters celebrate slower price growth, because they no longer have to compete against AirBnBers renting out apartments for twice their market value?

<comment><USER29> Renters lost the following things:

\- The ability to rent out their home when they go away for a long weekend or take a couple weeks of vacation somewhere, most likely financing a good portion of their rent or vacation.

\- Affordable ways for family to visit, especially nearby to where they live (e.g. When my family comes into town to see their grandchildren, there aren't even really any hotels nearby, let alone affordable ones. AirBnB was a good, affordable way for them to be nearby when they visit, since like most people in NYC, we don't have a guest bedroom).

What many renters would really celebrate, would be an end to many of the restrictions on building that are enriching the owners of the properties at the expense of renters. Much of NYC suffers from height restrictions, historical building laws, and an expensive process to build anything new (and neighbors who will do anything to make sure their properties don't have new competition that might lower prices).

<comment><USER30> Renter in NYC here (looks like you're one as well).

* I didn't lose the ability to rent my apartment out - that was always against the rules/law. My LL just put in new electronic locks in on my building to make sure it was significantly harder to lend apartments in the building out on Airbnb.

* As far as affordable places for family, I've always dissuaded them from renting from a largely unregulated market where quality can be difficult to determine in advance and the pitfalls of renting something unsavory could be bedbugs or worse. I live in a neighborhood well served by fairly affordable hotels nearby (in Manhattan!) which can be price competitive with Airbnb, and significantly more regulated.

I view this as a positive - this law did not change anyone's ability to rent out a bedroom in an apartment or house that they are also staying in, and stays over 30 days are still legal. It feels like a win/win to me.

<comment><USER31> > My LL just put in new electronic locks in on my building to make sure it was > significantly harder to lend apartments in the building out on Airbnb.

Can you explain this part? What do the electronic locks do to discourage lending?

<comment><USER30> Like goatsi said below, it makes it much harder to duplicate than a metal key, and tracks the times and fob IDs of everyone using it to get in the building. Instead of being able to run to Home Depot and get a key copy for $3 that you can hand out to whomever you're lending the apartment to, you'd need to copy your fob or lend them yours.

This makes it fairly trivial to lock a single fob out, and there are timestamps that can be corroborated with the camera in the building lobby, to see who was using the fob to get into the building.

Of course, cursory Googling when they were handed out shows that it's not that difficult to clone the model of key they handed out, but it's still a big 'win' over everyone having the same key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps it's me living in an area that used to be mostly boarding houses, but I do understand the concerns that hotels and homes have different impacts on a neighborhood and community. Zoning laws exist for that reason and many, many others.

What am I missing here?

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow, the Washington Post is now ignoring Google's cloaking rules and putting up their paywall even when clicking from Google if you've gone over their "free article limit" for the month. I've reported them to Google, here's hoping they get deindexed.

<comment><USER31> That happens if you visit the article first from your browser and then use the google-hack to try to get around it. If you really visit the site fresh from Google, you get the article.

I just tested. I know I'm over my WaPo limit, but I could pull up the article from Google, since I hadn't gone to it before.

<comment><USER33> That's more targeted cloaking, but cloaking nonetheless. I mean of course I can get around it by clearing WaPo cookies but that isn't the point. I just hate that these large sites think they can do whatever they want - and for the most part they get away with it.

<comment><USER34> They can get away with whatever they want? It's a company with employees that need to be paid, it's not just a free service for anyone to use.

<comment><USER33> They're flagrantly violating Google's rules. That's their choice, but the penalty is deindexing. Additionally, HN has a rule against posting links to sites that use paywalls without workarounds.

<comment><USER35> Do Google's rules really say that you must be able to read an article you've already found by clicking an index result? Or only that if you first find an article via Google you must be able to read it?

<comment><USER33> The rules say that they can't show Google one thing and users something else. If the content they showed to Google for this page was "subscribe today!" that would be fine, but that of course isn't what they showed to Google because a search result for this headline comes back with a link to the fully described article. That's the very definition of cloaking.

<comment><USER34> Technically, users are seeing the same thing if they actually come from Google. Paying for things that have value is a good thing, because otherwise those companies creating that content wouldn't exist. Plenty of other companies too if you'd rather get free content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is an expected headline/occurrence, but it shouldn't be what happens to sway one's opinion about the legislation. A hotel exec saying anything about business is news. What is the potential for a news org to write about the person who had a slightly easier time finding an affordable rent, which is the ostensible purpose of this bill?

It's not much different than when an executive politician stonewalls on prison reform. Willie Horton happened 30 years ago and he still hangs like a specter over the justice system. What about the thousands of released prisoners we never hear about because, if we haven't heard about them, they probably went on to live normal, non-imprisoned lives, as criminal justice reform intended.

</comment><comment><USER15> Market incumbent celebrates new market participant being kicked out? Color me shocked!

<comment><USER37> Is AirBnB really in the same market as hotels? I don't think AirBnB manages any property, do they?

Maybe they compete with franchises that solely license a brand?

<comment><USER38> Not taking a position here, but just to answer the question on the face of it. Yes, AirBnB is in the same market as hotels.

The market is short term rental property, not property management services. Supply chain is how one obtains inventory of product to sell into a market, it does not define what the market is. Owning and managing real estate that can be resold as a short term rental is just one supply chain solution to sell into the market. AirBnB uses a different one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> He didn't need to say it. It was obvious the hotel industry was going to react this way, due to there being less supply, and, presumably, approximately the same amount of demand for temporary lodging in NYC.

</comment><comment><USER40> Affordable housing > low hotel prices. In Traverse City, Michigan we are facing a drought of affordable housing. Low rent spare rooms are being rented out on AirBNB et. al. for more money and because of that those rooms aren't available for service workers and students. The most unwelcome side effect of this is that several businesses could not open this year for lack of labor and many others operated below capacity for the same reason.

</comment><comment><USER41> The truth is Airbnb should have been nothing more than a hotel room marketplace like booking.com - instead they used this "innovative" but completely illegal way of booking "rooms". If all the hotels did the same and stopped registering, paying for licenses, inspections, maintaining safety standards etc. I am sure they could easily undercut airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've only had good experiences with AirBnB. Almost exclusively the issue here seems to be guest partying and abuse of the property. Is this really true? How is it the guest rating system doesn't quickly eliminate guests that cause problems?

Who is doing so much partying? Where did these people come from? Where do they normally party before AirBnb?

<comment><USER42> Isn't the guest rating filled by the owner rather than the neighbors? That would be an obvious explanation.

<comment><USER38> I don't see why the owner wouldn't get harassed by the neighbors for being loud, plus trashing the place is one of the common 'party' related complaints.

However, guest reviews cannot be updated, so I can see how learning about problems days later may allow bad guests to dodge the bullet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's no free lunch. In low vacancy market with a large amount of tourism if you divert housing stock to vacation rental, then housing prices go up and vacation rental goes down. This means that the cities poor are subsidizing a more affluent tourist (or business traveler).

</comment><comment><USER44> The majority of AirBnB hosts are individuals just trying to make some extra money. The lobbyies are claiming these units prevent the homeless from finding homes. How about the people that avoid becoming homeless by AirBnB'ing one of their rooms?

The hypocrisy in this situation is mind blowing. Thanks to Citizen's United, corporates are protected and allowed unlimited money for lobbying as "Freedom of Speech". But when the individual wants to advertise a room in their private home, the government censors that speech?

This is just another example of how our Democracy has been hijacked by lobbyists. Neither Clinton, nor Trump, not even Bernie Sanders could cleanse this rot from our democracy. The only way I see for us to take it back is with a Constitutional Amendment ending this legalized bribery. The group that's making the most progress towards this goal is Wolf-PAC. You can read more about it and help with the cause here:

[http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan](http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan)

<comment><USER45> > How about the people that avoid becoming homeless by AirBnB'ing one of their > rooms?

Actual home sharing, that is, renting an extra room in your residence, is still allowed. This legislation doesn't touch that.

The target of this legislation is people who were creating businesses by buying condos purely to permanently rent on Airbnb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wonder what would happen if there was a spot and contract market for housing like there is for DRAM.

</comment><comment><USER47> From the article:

"Renting out an entire apartment for less than 30 days has been illegal under New York law for the last six years, but the rules were not enforced until very recently (Renting out a single room is legal)."

So what if you rented out one bedroom of an apartment on Airbnb and the living room and kitchen were public areas? Public because your spouse rented out the bathroom for the first 15 days of each moth for a dollar and let's say one of your parents rented it our for the remaining days of that month.

You divulge this to each Airbnb guest but tell them, "don't worry, the other occupant doesn't have plans to stop by during your stay and if they are not on premise in the room they reserved, you are free to make short term usage of it." The wink and nod will be implied.

</comment><comment><USER48> High hotel prices are a real downside to business in NYC.

In Los Angeles (and most other U.S. cities) you can find a place that is pretty nice around $120 a night. In NYC you are talking about at least twice that.

<comment><USER49> I picked a random weekend in November. There are 228 hotels listed on Orbitz for < $125/night. Midtown, Chelsea, Times Square, etc. Are people only picking the one single hotel right across the street from where they need to be and extrapolating from that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It is pretty circular that NYC has started putting up homeless people in hotels. Without ABnB maybe tourists can start staying back in the hotels and the homeless people can rent the apartments.

</comment><comment><USER51> Wasn't there just a study that AirBnB consumes excess demand anyway?

Doesn't that mean the Hotel CEO should've been able to raise prices anyway, regardless of AirBnB?

</comment><comment><USER52> First of all I want to say that this regulation, like most regulations of these nature, will do very little if anything to combat the affordable housing crisis in NYC. There's a severe non-luxury housing shortage. The solution is to build more non-luxury housing.

Regarding the regulation, it's well-meaning but poorly designed, broadly punishing anyone who wants to sublet their whole apartment for <30 days. I subletted my room multiple times at my last NYC apartment while I was on vacation. It was nice to make side income on a room that would've been vacant anyways, while allowing tourists (one of which became a good friend of mine) to visit NYC without paying the outrageous hotel prices here (yesterday I was looking for a hotel for the same night, the cheapest I could find would've cost $350, most were going for $450+).

I get it, we want to punish landlords who turn apartments into illegal hotels. Then why don't we simply target landlords renting out apartments that aren't their primary residences instead of painting broad strokes and making it illegal for me to make some extra income off of my vacant room while I'm on vacation, or sublet a place for 10 days while I look for a more permanent accomodation? These regulations are lazy and inefficient, causing unnecessary negative distortions to the market.

But before I come off as sounding really pro AirBnB, AirBnB has absolutely terrible customer service and a pretty steep fee (6-12% for the guest, 3% for the host), and thus I'm really hoping a competitor will step in to break this monopoly and force them to get their act together.

A couple months ago after my lease ended I decided to try living on AirBnB full-time, switching apartments every month. It worked out for the first two stays, but three days ago I ended up in a disgusting apartment with no internet connection and a different room that I had booked for 30 days.

Immediately I contacted AirBnB, and since then I've wasted an extraordinary amount of time over the phone/email with them trying to get them to simply cancel my reservation and refund me for the time I won't be staying there. After over 24 hours of this, they closed my case and offered me a $100 refund, telling me I'd need to accept this measly offer within 24-hours or get nothing (I paid over $1,600 for the reservation). Had to keep calling and eventually was able to escalate it to a supervisor, but right now three days after my initial contact with AirBnB, the reservation has been cancelled but there's still no word regarding any refund.

 _TLDR: This regulation is too broad and not targeted enough, but AirBnB has terrible customer service so it 's hard for me to feel sorry for them and I wouldn't recommend them for long-term stays._

</comment><comment><USER53> That's a pretty shitty way of celebrating....

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm curious, why did the author use the word "celebrate"?

</comment><comment><USER55> I guess Airbnb did not do what most industrials do - bribe the politicians. In societies where large parts of the economy are either owned by the government or directed through regulations the only way to advance is to corrupt public officials.

But when arguing from a principled position that views freedom as the highest value one can possess it is very hard to come up with a consistent and valid argument why private persons should not be allowed to rent out their property in the same way that "legal" hotels do.

Safety regulations are often cited but why shouldn't a place be good enough for a guest while it is good enough for local people living there? And why should a guest not be able to decide for him or herself if it's acceptable to stay there? (with Airbnb you'll actually get a much nicer place for the same money, especially in NY "legal" hotel owners got away with charging $250 for flea infested 2 star s __* holes due to low competition)

Then there's the argument that properties rented out at Airbnb are generally advertised as great for parties. This is not true, anyone who has used this platform will know that these people offering their place go to great lengths to ensure that their guests wont do that. And even if they did, there are ways for neighbours to get reparations for damages, both from the guests (the law of the land applies to them too!) and the person renting out the place.

To me all of this sounds like politicians who are in the pocket of a certain industry ruling in favour of the same industry. This is similar to what is happening to Uber.

One thing is for sure: By suppressing competition in this way the government effectively creates an Aristocracy where everything is rigged against the average person.

Another angle to look at this issue: If you can't use your property in a way that doesn't harm anyone, like renting it to someone, is it then still _your_ property?</comment>