zlacker

No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that.

This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as the cause for failure but ignoring the fact that Ello was dead in the water regardless of it. The company had no users and no business model. Heck a reasonable amount of ethical advertising may actually have done some good for the community and helped the product survive.

>>paxys+(OP)
I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expertise + moderate programming skills.

>>paxys+(OP)
>Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that.

Ditto. Retrospectively it seems a fiasco from the start. I wonder why investors bought it and Talenthouse.

Maybe investors in the first round were hoping to find some suckers in the future and offload the "business" to them.

But what about the final buyers? Didn't they smell anything wrong? You got to ask how did they make the money they lost on Elo / Talenthouse in the first place.

>>hiAndr+v9
Can you give us examples of such startups?

Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.

>>DeathA+Qn
No, that's why I asked. Where are they? What are they doing?

>>hiAndr+v9
The closest thing I can think of is patio11’s Bingo Card Creator. But he moved on to… venture funded payments processing.

I think, though, the people who can and do bootstrap small businesses like that don’t necessarily hang out here. The site is literally VC-owned, after all.

>>paxys+(OP)
I mean Mastodon exists, each instance requiring just a small amount of funding to keep the lights on. There is also Tildes, which I think is a nonprofit registered in Canada.

It depends on what your aim is. Had Ello followed a proper nonprofit structure from the start, they could have continued indefinitely with a small staff and volunteers maintaining an open source code base and handling moderation. It would not necessarily be easy, but it would be doable.

They didn't though, and the fact that the original CEO later got into into NFTs and now something-AI maybe shows he was something of a bandwagon-jumper. Back then everyone wanted to be the next Facebook, so that was what he jumped into.

>>hiAndr+v9
These are called lifestyle businesses.

There are tons of them out there.

You can do a lot with a small VPS and a fixed amount of bandwidth.

Find something that 100 people will use for 5 bucks a month. IF your bills are paid and you have a day job, that's some nice pocket money.