Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making money by charging customers?

Re:Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making mone... by brlewis on Monday November 26, 2007 @01:41PM (#83642)

That's actually 52/year. I'll take this as a lesson that the word "year" should be in bold.

The "sort-by-date" feature is the starting point for what distinguishes ourdoings.com. But I don't want to go into detail here. If you have a few hundred photos that lend themselves to chronological organization, make yourself a free site and give it a try. If you don't like it, use the "Tear down this site..." option on your site info page, and the "Forget I exist..." option on your personal info page.

More relevant to the business model question, it's important to look at the ad vs pay question from your customer's point of view. From my own point of view, pay is better because I don't want ads on the pages where I share my photos. However, I'm catering toward people who have very little time to spare. Freeing them from filling out a form with credit card info is a time saver. They will put up with ads for other convenience.

Initially it was pay-only, but I changed it.

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Re:Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making mone... by izak30 on Monday November 26, 2007 @02:04PM (#83652)

Yeah, actually picasa doesn't have ads at second glance either, I've been using it for quite a while now, and as with most ads, I don't even notice that they're there (a note to people who think that ad-based models get user's attention).

I certainly don't want to argue with you, or tell you that your business won't work (I can't say that I know TOO much about that), but picasa auto-arranges albums by date too. It doesn't have the blog feel of your albums, which I sort of like.

I like that you've added a free service, but I guess I just didn't see what made somebody choose your pay service (even per year) over google's, who gives 10Gb for $20 per year.

My bigger question, is how can us little guys compete with Google and Yahoo and Microsoft on anything?

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Re:Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making mone... by brlewis on Monday November 26, 2007 @02:28PM (#83659)

Here's a quick answer to your bigger question: Google has attracted a large number of users who like the way picasaweb feels now, and they need to keep those users happy. How can they ever compete with lots of little guys who make things that appeal to others?

A longer answer will appear in a blog post in the not-too-distant future.

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Re:Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making mone... by izak30 on Monday November 26, 2007 @02:35PM (#83666)

They do that with the ability to change the defaults, and add new features, like a hosted blog management (blogger) or similar. The same could be done for picasa.

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Re:Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making mone... by brlewis on Monday November 26, 2007 @03:07PM (#83673)

Every option/feature has a cost. If they try to be all things to all people they will fail.

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