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jkap
@jkap

there's certainly benefits to having a small staff (the main one being "relatively reduced expenses"1) but i really fucking wish we could afford to hire more people.

a major caveat to only having two software devs is that we have to be pretty selective about what major projects we take on. everything has to be either Extremely Desired by users or Directly Revenue Generating2. we don't have the flexibility to experiment, try new shit, etc. we operate in the unfortunate paradox of being an Alternative Social Media Platform Operating On Nonstandard Ideals and Not Actually Being Able To Try New Shit Because We Don't Have The Resources.

i see something like tumblr's Communities feature (in secret development but behind a feature flag it's not quite that, read the comments, thanks @twilight-sparkle for documenting it) and my immediate response is "man i really wish we could throw someone at shit like that." if we had the people, i would have wanted us to start working on features to allow for reddit-style communities two weeks ago, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg; there is so much we want to do that we just can't because we don't have the resources to do it without neglecting the other work that needs to happen.

as i've said before, there's also the disproportionate impact that health and personal issues have with such a small team. in an ideal world, asks would have been done a few weeks ago, but i haven't been able to meaningfully work on them in two weeks due to health and personal issues.

these are all consequences of how we've chosen to finance and run the company. we are always going to be at a competitive disadvantage against VC funded companies (which are able to burn money effectively forever) and open source projects (which are dependent on free labor and thus don't need money to burn). if i had the option, i wouldn't change those decisions. but man i would love to have some more financial flexibility here.


  1. i say "relatively" here because we're still nowhere close to profitable/sustainable. our revenue currently only covers about one employee3, and that's only if we ignore other operational costs4.

  2. as much as i hate to admit it, we do need money to live

  3. subscribe to cohost plus

  4. full financial update coming this week btw, sorry that's taken so long.


blaurascon
@blaurascon
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in reply to @jkap's post:

open source projects (which are dependent on free labor and thus don't need money to burn).

I mean, the grand majority of open source projects have to make the same kind of calculus, (maintainer of one, both maintainers of the project are dealing with burnout, it's been a year since we did a proper release) it just doesn't directly threaten anyone's livelihood. We still are running shoestrings of labor and praying we get it right.

All of this to say that god I hate dealing with that horrible calculus of "how much work can we actually put into feature y?"

over here most people don't use or even have credit cards, we use debit cards and our own online payment system called iDEAL which was conceived and supported by all our major banks

anyway, to answer your question, for me its usually either paypal (bleh) or buying something locally. it'd be interesting to hear if supporting more "country specific" payment methods seems viable (i.e. not costing immense amount of time) to implement?

i have no expertise in this area but it does seem like Stripe does support iDEAL payments, but it's probably not as easy as just ticking a checkbox

anyway, it wasn't really a deep question on "how to implement" just like "is this on your radar"? because i would sure love to get cohost plus but payment methods is what's blocking me.

there’s limitations around us being able to use paypal so that won’t happen for a bit. last time i looked, stripe’s ideal support didn’t work for subscriptions but that appears to have changed. will investigate that

(also, just to be clear, my question was intended as an "i'm american and don't know the full breadth of what Exists". this was genuinely helpful)

ooh awesome! it would be really nice if it's now possible to add it without too much trouble!

and yeah no worries!! from friends ive heard that Denmark and Sweden and Finland each also have their own "iDEAL-like" system, so it seems quite a fragmented market, but recently there was news that iDEAL would be expanding and try to become a European standard so maybe that would also help the payment processor market down the line by making it simpler

additional note: i just went in and enabled everything we weren't already supporting for recurring payments; iDEAL should show up now (it doesn't for me but presumably that's because i have a US billing address) along with some other options.

"Cash App Pay" and "US Bank Account" showed up in the list now, but iDEAL is still not in the list for me. i'll check again later just in case it takes a while to appear, but either way thanks for checking and hopefully y'all can get it added sometime down the line! :yeah:

It's okay that things move slow - as you said, others will probably get there first on things like Communities, but I appreciate the effort to get things right in a way that serves both the goals of Cohost and the folks who use it. :)

Oh do I know how you feel. My employer is a Big Site (something like 175 M+ unique items for sale) and we have only 5 engineers. So when I see my friends talk about doing the little game jam thingies where they do nothing for a week besides make an experimental feature that's never going to get used I go ???? you have bandwidth to waste??? Must be nice.

I really appreciate how transparent you are about how cohost is run. And, hopefully, people aren't giving you too much of a hassle for having a small team and small team problems while trying to run a site that can have Big Site Problems.

While it probably won't make anybody feel "better," my experience has been that you only have four kinds of projects and products. You have (1) the personal passion projects that do whatever the creator wants. You have (2) the cold-blooded organizations that carefully weigh the return on investment over every single modification. You have (3) the mismanaged teams where the leadership thinks that they have the first category. And you have (4) trust fund babies (VC funded, whatever) who make (3) look like legitimate as they leak money all over the place.

That said, I don't know (nor should I) what the financial impact would be of sidelining "real" Cohost projects for a while. Intuition tells me that the target demographic of Cohost is people who'd be more up for weird experimental features than cranking out things on a roadmap, but I only see through a narrow window.

(A couple of weeks until I can subscribe without needing to worry, though, so at least I can start helping that much.)

As someone who has to be super selective now about content decisions but also had to try to keep convincing someone to keep building new, cool features for a website not that many years ago, I relate to this a lot. For what it's worth, I think you're all doing great and consistently showing progress on new features!