Comment by Youden
5 years ago
I get the decision but I think it misses part of the problem: how do you convince people like your mum and dad to start paying for backups and how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?
I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service.
But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for advertising?
Normally, I'd suspect it's the tech-savvy younger folks who'd tell them to buy something like this but with your pricing and lack of self-hosted options, I suspect you've alienated a large portion of the tech-savvy audience you need to advocate for your product.
If their service works well and is convenient to use, I’ll be recommending it by word of mouth. In the case of my parents, if I can finally consolidate and de-duplicate the photos from our 3+ Apple Photos collections by pointing the service at “library” folders from a few computers and devices, I’ll be a big fan.
> how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?
We are hopeful that we will be able to reduce the pricing as we scale up and hit a critical mass.
> who's going to tell them to do that?
We plan to implement a referral program, similar to what Dropbox did, to incentivize existing customers to spread the word.
That said, you do bring up interesting points. To repeat, we aren't averse to the idea of maintaining a self-hosted variant. Just that due to our limited bandwidth we had to choose one direction over another. Having advocates is important and I suppose with time we will have clarity on how to best do this without stretching ourselves too thin.
For our (nascent) product went the other way and prioritised self-hosting at the expense of stretching ourselves too thin, as that's always been #1 ask from folks looking for "consumer-first" alternatives.
Time will tell if it was the right way forward, but I just went with "you can't fight gravity" and built it the way folks expect it to be (ex: supabase / posthog / gitlab).
I really hope the self-hosted option becomes a thing, but unfortunately "we are not averse to the idea" means especially little in the tech world these days.
That being said, really really hoping for your success! It finally fills a MUCH needed gap in 2021 consumer image viewing software.
There are many many gaps in it right now. Synology is basically the only self-hosted photo solution that grandma could use. Honestly surprised that more people aren't taking advantage of the opportunity.
I think that's a bit apocalyptic. Plenty of time to observe and adjust.