If even 5% of the 6 million users paid $20 a year, Soup would have $6 million a year - more than enough to run a small company on.
FInally, i'll point to my favorite post on the subject, Don't be a free user by idlewords: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
I used to believe this. Now Google Play Music is dead despite my $20/month.
The analytics for their site are 632.67K total visits in June. Interestingly 30% from Poland.
Those aren't the figures of a site with 6m active users.
Yes, that's not a massive amount of money and it was a long time ago, but it should still mean that they're not totally in control of the company, and that there are investors that have been expecting a return out of it eventually. Just reaching a break-even/moderately-profitable state probably wouldn't have been good enough.
I also see this article on TechCrunch talking about "soup.me" receiving $530,000 in VC in 2012: https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/14/soup-me-lands-530000-lets-...
It specifically says that it's a "reboot service" of soup.io, but the soup.me site no longer exists, so I'm not certain. Their inactive Twitter account (https://twitter.com/soup_me) does have an identical logo and a location of Vienna (same as soup.io), so it's probably true that it's the same company.
That's definitely a much larger amount of VC, and would make it even less possible for "sustainable" to be an acceptable end goal for the site.
I find this viewpoint problematic. Are the users freeloaders, or is the product just not compelling enough to attract paying users?
Self reflection is sometimes painful but there's a reason "lack of market fit" is a common startup story. Insulting the users by calling them freeloaders, when you are overtly offering them a free service, seems self-defeating.
There’s no cognitive dissonance in believing both of these things at the same time. The non-paying users are freeloaders because they’re gaining value with no intention of paying for it. The service isn’t compelling enough because, despite all of the attention it’s getting, it can’t attract paying customers.
They’re both causative to some degree, but from the entrepreneuer’s perspective, there’s nothing that can be done about human nature— you just have to account for it when designing your offerings.
> This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over.
I may be full of it, but I'm fairly confident I could reduce their server costs to below their revenue in a matter of days or weeks. 6 million users is a lot, but it's not vast even if they have real-time connections and a lot of storage.
I imagine that a lot of HN more experienced users could do the same.
Assuming I'm not full of it, that suggests soup.io could be marginally profitable as long as nobody is paid to run it.
At 1.5k€ MRR, it would still have to be a labour of love for someone.
I couldn't afford to put in the time for free, but surely there are others who can.
Maybe they did. Maybe they decided it's possible but would take too long and they can't afford the loss meanwhile. Maybe they explored options but don't have the right knowledge.
But 10k€ monthly cost for serving 6 million users seems avoidably high unless it's something compute and data intensive like gaming.
It seems like a perfectly normal cost, even a sensible choice, for a cloud-based, invested-in startup with cash to burn that is optimising for speed to market and growth. But not for one that is cost optimised.
All that said, I wonder if their cost is actually mostly on people to run and develop the thing. Other comments have taken it as meaning the cost of infrastructure, and I ran with that. But soup.io's own note does not say it's all on servers.
If that's the case, obviously it's a different situation and there may be no reasonable way to reduce the costs below revenue.
Some key factors here:
- Discontinuing expensive parts of the product is better than discontinuing the entire product.
- I see the M word being thrown around and that… uh… potentially says something.
- "We're not open sourcing because the product is too complicated" is also extremely telling.
- VERY often, "I'll discontinue because I can't afford to run it anymore" hides an underlying "I don't want to run it anymore"; one the maintainer sometimes doesn't fully realize themselves. I've seen this a lot on GDPR day, people shutting off services because it's "too expensive to comply". Talked to a bunch of them, and after a lot of chatting it always boils down to "This will give me a much needed break from the stress of running this thing which doesn't pay my rent, and I get to dodge the blame".
I'm going to go ahead and extend the offer GP can't make. soup.io maintainers, if you're reading this, are indeed spending 10k+ EUR on infra, and do want to keep your service alive and running, please reach out, I'll work pro bono. I also have some good contacts in the archiving world if it comes to that.
Possible. But they might not be very good at it if they’re serving 6M users with 10K/month in cost in the first place, so they wouldn’t know where to get the wins either.
Of course, it’s also possible us armchair devs are just wrong.
Also, s3 quickly sums up if you host content and its difficult to replace.
Ouch. If they are selling servers that cost more to run than they are getting from the sale, that's foolish and difficult to back out of.
If the servers don't cost more to run than they are getting from the sale, cost shouldn't be a problem as it's net income. Doesn't matter if it's expensive.
> Also, s3 quickly sums up if you host content and its difficult to replace.
It's a lot of work to replace S3 if it's deeply embedded in all the code, and especially if people have been linking directly to S3 buckets.
Depends how much data they are storing of course, but S3 migration can be done when there's a compelling need. It's not the cheapest storage around.
> I couldn't afford to put in the time for free, but surely there are others who can.
OK.
In this case the main site is https://www.soup.io/ and the submitted story is to their news/blog site at kitchen.soup.io. Go to the main site and it is clear there what they do.
There is actually a link to that at kitchen.soup.io, but it is easy to miss. It's the small red circled "soup" in the very upper right.
I find it really annoying...
Also, it could just be the result of some bad ops/sysadmin decisions.
Tuning up the opportunity cost of spamming while making semi-targeted advertising more accessible and less obtrusive could tap into that market.
User data is toxic. It's your responsibility to make sure it gets disposed of properly when winding down a failed venture.
I appreciate your point, but I'm struck by the impression that this never results in consequences.
So you say you shouldn't sell your site because the new owners might mess something up and harm users; does this mean you can't ever leave a company that you start? If you leave, the new people running it after you are gone might mess things up and harm users.
How is that any different than selling the company? In both instances, you are handing full control off to someone else. Just in one case, you are turning over control to someone you chose to hire instead of someone you chose to sell to. Either way, you are making a judgment call on their worthiness.
Are you really trying to say that if you start a company and want to leave, you have to shut it down?
This also seems to imply that when people sign up to a site, they are doing so because they trust a particular individual. Most people don't even know who the people behind a site are.
I think you are making out selling your company to be a bigger moral issue than it is.
Now it is quite possible that they are using more server resources and bandwidth than are actually necessary to support their current users and the current usage patterns of those current users.
But there is quite a gap between 10k/month and 1.5k/month, so if you take it over with the intent of making it profitable as opposed to simply making it less unprofitable you are probably going to have to find a way to increase revenue substantially even if you can reduce costs.
It's hard to see a good way to do that. Their revenue comes from ads shown to their free users and subscription fees from the users who have paid for an ad-free experience.
To increase ad revenue you can either try to get advertisers to pay more per ad or show more ads.
Getting advertisers to pay more seems unlikely. It's too random a user base to really be valuable.
Showing more ads might increase revenue. But it might also make the experience for free users worse, leading some to leave. Free users leaving does reduce operating costs a bit...but if it also reduces new content, it might make the experience worse for paying users, so you might lose some of them.
How about increasing subscription revenue? Maybe you can impose limits on free users to encourage them to subscribe--but that might drive some away. Maybe raising subscription prices would work...or maybe lowering them so more buy them would work. Or maybe adding features for subscribers beyond ad-free would entice more to buy.
The problem is that you can't really tell how well any of these things will work. All you know for sure is that they have somehow built a user base of 6 million apparently somewhat satisfied users and if you take over you are going to have to poke it with a few sharp sticks to get it going the right way and hope it doesn't get too annoyed.
Even if the site is sold, your reputation will still suffer if the new owner has a data leak or starts selling user data.
Also, a bunch of people will say that they want to take over the site, but finding someone that you think is competent enough to maintain it is really difficult. In my case, I tried two different people and both of them made some really bad decisions regarding the design during the trial period.
The "Imperial We", obviously. Goes along with "someone should do something ...".
It's true it would be nice to keep copies for posterity, but it's not realistically possible to archive everything created for all time.
OTOH, state actors like the NSA should be archiving lots of things like this, because "you never know ...". But, unfortunately for us, a meme from years ago nailed this: "My computer hard drive crashed. NSA won't send me their backup copy."
The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and more complex over the years and the amount of data is huge, really huge. To serve nearly 6 million users is a resource-intensive duty.
This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over.
Hard to know where the $ are exactly going, but $11k/month will buy you a lot of server. Sounds like maybe just wasn't worth it given the revenue but I've got to believe it could be rearchitected so at least the hosting portion was profitable.
[0] https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696542642/Thanks-for-your-feedb...
People treat the cost of infrastructure as irrelevant as it should just be a fraction of the costs, at least starting out. But there would be numerous smaller opportunities which could be profitable if costs were managed properly.
I think I read their revenues were 1500/mo - not nearly enough to pay for running costs and a single founder salary.
It has some shortcomings, mainly content is saved under random file name without extension. Hm, maybe I'll try to fix that now.
https://github.com/ikari-pl/downsouper
Still has some downsides, but getting better. It doesn't download the posts from discussions yet. You can get your own posts and links to full-size images (no resize means both better quality AND faster download), includes the jq-xargs-wget pipes I used.
Then I want to add an exporter that would be able to convert it to, whatever, wordpress export format? Cry and go to tumblr? No idea. :(
I clicked around for a few minutes and saw a lot of user activity and no ads. If I owned the site, rather than trying to close, I'd just make every tenth post in a feed be an ad.
That plus some actions to curtail server costs, depending on whatever their high cost items are... Seems like you could probably monetize that userbase somehow.
This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you write with a third party service such as soup.io, eventually your writings will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or 'it became too expensive to run' in this case. If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care: they post on eg soup, their writings last a few years then vanish, they shrug and move on. I worry that it's a cultural thing: Few people care for the permanence of deep thoughts, and that's a big pity.
The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/
Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)
They’d need to register an account with a supported provider and do the initial domain registration & dns pointing, but a step by step guide could be made for that.
> The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and more complex over the years and the amount of data is huge, really huge. To serve nearly 6 million users is a resource-intensive duty.
> This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over.
However, that isn't a valid justification to not open-source the code.
I also read this comment on their blog 'We do this for free, invest our time and money and try to keep this site up and running. So please don't insult us. Instead you should donate to support us.'
Sounds like they weren't really running it like a business and didn't have much idea on how to monetise it. Shame.
Amount of user posts, spambot trash would made rather pointless for achive.org to scrap soup content, I believe
The owners listed the domain on flippa asking for 40k+ and stated they had an existing offer of $40k and wanted to see if they could get a better offer from flippa buyers.
update: minimal listing details are available from bing cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3A%2F%2Fflippa.com%2...
A real soup startup could exist where outdoor (on plastic) pressure cooker based temporary kitchen operations could create a monthly soup festival / contest with pressure canning standards and inspectors on premises. It sounds like a festival and not a technology company at first, and I admit that the Atlanta Chili Cook-off (atlantachilicookoff.com) is similar, but imagine something like this with an app designed to enable monthly soup distribution teams who collect order forms during each cook-off type event. They could deliver the soup through the app during each cook-off event or through the mail.
Because soup is limited in how it is produced a standards based environment (based on pressure cookers / canners) could enable swift build-outs of kitchens on grass and plastic tarps each of which could utilize propane and cook soup with a process that is designed to ease inspection through conforming to a standard that the app explains. Food hygiene inspectors could be present and essentially all kitchen processes could be better inspected than any restaurant during this event (in theory) where massive amounts of soup could be produced and then pressure canned. This could be a distribution hub for homelessness if a donor model was included to help there be free cans as well as a subscriber model so that each team could have a monthly recurring revenue based on their popularity where they are doing everything during the event except procuring ingredients from farmers markets and whatnot. You can have a dozen pressure canners lined up next to each other and make a heck of a lot of soup all at once unlike what you can do with bread, or many different types of food. This should enable a new type of festival to exist.
Anyone could be a chef with this model if they knew their ingredients like that back of their hand and they practiced with a pressure cooker at home until they had it down pat. They could lease pressure canning and/or cooking infrastructure during the event to reach their goals if they qualify in and stay popular.
Please feel free to run with this idea if you think you can move it forward. I simply am busy with other projects. Others have probably thought of this before, and I'm probably missing something, but I'm just seeing what people think.
