Comments on: 113: TZ Interview – Jeff Atwood / Stack Exchange

By: Daniel Laursen

Daniel Laursen — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:58:39 +0000

Hi, thanks for a super podcast. I’m a fan from Denmark and your podcast have been my inspiration for my danish podcast for Startups. I’m editor of a quite popular tech blog in Denmark and have been listening to your podcast the last couple of month.

In this (#113) Podcast Jason talked about a online service for his soccerteam to get better and archieve point and trophies.
My blog, Trendsonline.dk are going to interview a webservice that does exactly that, check out http://www.soccertrix.com. If interested I can set you up with the founder or you can contact him yourself.

Looking forward to hear more podcast from you

By: Nethy

Nethy — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:52:45 +0000

HI Guys,

Great podcast. I enjoyed the part where Joel says he doesn’t believe in selling software. I would have enjoyed hearing that discussed a bit more. Have you guys read “Free”, by Chris Anderson? Lots of interesting little point there. I think Jeff brought up a great point, but generalized it a little too far.

Over time, the cost of producing and delivering software decreases while the marginal gain benefit of producing more/bigger software doesn’t always justify the same size. So, it’s conceivable that at some point a very small team could produce a free alternative to Freshbooks. If it’s cheap (say, 1 person a 100k per year at the extreme) and successful (as many customers as Freshbooks at the extreme) enough, even the shoddiest of business models could be very lucrative. Obviously there is a continuum for each of these (business model, # of users, cost of developing) that freshbooks is already far to the left of (1.6m users with 50 employees compare to Intuit @ 8000 employees & $3b revenues). If you have a situation where some of the fringe benefits of free are important (network effects, low barrier to entry, etc) and there is definitely a kind of pressure towards free.

On the other hand, and I think this is where Jeff’s comment is interesting, there are non obvious effects to charging/not charging. Jeff mentions how it affect their dynamic with their users and helps the relationship be non adversarial. I can see how game dynamics could go down badly on a paid site. But in some cases, paying can change the dynamics in a positive way. For example paying for advice means you’ll probably act on it. Paying for hours means you’ll make them count. For bookkeeping, there might be an important positioning advantage to paid software, marking it as professional software.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:56:03 +0000

Open id does not communicate it’s purpose clearly enough to regular people. There is no possible way that the bartender down the street is going to even know what open id is. I guarantee that they are going to know what Facebook and Twitter is. The reason why facebook works is because the bartender down the street understands it. The same goes for apple products.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:12:00 +0000

@Philippe – Thx for the kind words. Jason always prepares his questions before hand and I always make up mine as I go along. As you can imagine my technique is a bit hit-and-miss so it’s nice that it worked for once!

By: Philippe Monnet

Philippe Monnet — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:32:02 +0000

Started to listen to the first half on my way to work and very much enjoyed it as I used to be a regular listener of the Stack Overflow Podcast as well. I have a ton of respect for SO, Jeff and Joel.
Justin, great interview questions so far. You brought up topics I never heard Jeff talk about on SO.
I found the Clark Kent vs Superman story quite defining and motivating. Looking forward to the second half tonight!