lorem ipsum intro
Another Line
Questions after break
Tell us a bit about yourself and Pinboard. Is Pinboard a 1 man operation?
I started Pinboard in the spring of 2009 and opened it up to paying users in early July of that year. I do all the development on the site myself. My girlfriend helps out with billing and localization.
What’s your daily workflow like? What apps do you find crucial to your work?
Most of my day to day work involves handling routine support requests through email and Twitter. This typically means just answering questions or logging in to the server to find out why something’s not working right for a user. I use TweetDeck as a Twitter client although it’s pretty awful, just because I don’t have time to try much new stuff and I’m familiar with it.
For development work on the site I use BBEdit and run a local version of Pinboard on my laptop. I use Subversion as my code repository and update the production servers after pretty much every change with a simple script. I don’t have any kind of staging or testing server.
Most useful to me are FireBug, innotop (for seeing what the DB is thinking about), apachetop and the usual set of unix administration tools.
What makes bookmarking uniquely challenging?
People are (understandably) very risk-averse when it comes to their bookmarks, so it is very important not to spook users. An archiving site like ours is meant to be around for decades, so I need to be very conservative in how I run the site. At the same time, we’re in a field that’s full of free competitors, so I have to constantly make sure we’re offering great value in comparison.
How do you pack so much power into Pinboard’s simple interface? Do you test multiple colors of blue and fuss over each pixel in a line?
No, that way lies madness. I try to find something that looks reasonable on a Mac and a PC, and then stop futzing. If people hate it I ask for suggestions and try again.
Pinboard has one of the most unique pricing schemes of all web apps I’ve seen. How did you come up with it, and in your opinion, is it working good?
The idea came from Joshua Schachter. I wanted some way to keep spammers out of the site, so an up-front fee seemed appealing. He suggested having it go up with each signup, which was a brilliant twist.
I think this worked extremely well for us in early days; now that the site is bigger I’ve scaled down the rate at which the signup fee grows and it’s attracted less attention.
Most web apps are either free or subscriptions. Why do you think more web apps are not sold as a product, with a one-time purchase like Pinboard?
I believe part of it is cultural. We have no problem spending $7 on a meal up front, but paying for a web app (even with a refund policy) seems to give people much more trouble. I also think billing is still very cumbersome, both on the customer and on the developer side. You can see on the Apple app store (where it’s much easier to make a purchase, and where there is a curated collection of apps) that people have no problem paying small amounts for good software.
As for subscription pricing, I think it’s very attractive to developers because it creates a permanent revenue stream and is just as easy to implement as a one-time fee. However, it makes the customer have to constantly re-evaluate whether they are getting value from the product, and creates more work for them if they decide to cancel. I like the simplicity of a one-time fee and hope our customers do too.
One of Pinboard’s best features, in my opinion, is integration with other apps like Instapaper and Twitter. Do you think more and more web apps will start working together like that?
I believe so. There is intense pressure from users to make useful connections with other services, and the technical side is maturing to the point where such connections are easier to set up. I particularly like working with Instapaper since Marco is also a sole developer and the two products are particularly complementary – Pinboard is a kind of long-term archive for many Instapaper users.
Is Pinboard your only job? Any plans for building other apps?
Pinboard is my full-time job. I don’t have plans to work on anything else, and I have a big to-do list for the site.
For the most part, would you rather use a simple app that does one job well, or a larger app that includes every function in the world?
I think drawing the correct border around a feature set is the hardest thing in product design. When you get it right, it feels magical, but you never get it right.
What features might we have missed in Pinboard? Any awesome things most people usually overlook?
I’m pretty proud that our page archiving saves dependencies (like images and stylesheets). No one else offers that, but without it archiving is not very useful.
I also think the browser plugins are pretty great, since they allow you to quickly save your set of open tabs and give it a name.
lorem ipsum
Thanks, Maciej!
lorem ipsum