Joel Liu's Library tagged Xmarks → View Popular, Search in Google

Sep

2010

Hacker News | End of the Road for Xmarks

news.ycombinator.com/item

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Xmarks Case Bookmark

with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free
After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear...
Maybe it's because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.
10 more annotation(s)...
- Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone.
  It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.
- Fair point, but how about this: they've committed to 3 months anyway, so why not try charging for 3 months? Just don't touch the money coming in during that period. If they reach the end of that time, and it's not working, issue refunds and shut down. There is some cost to this (transaction fees etc), but seemingly minimal compared to other running costs they've already committed to (because if it fails, the number of transactions will necessarily be low).
  They might struggle to get people to sign up when there is doubt about the service surviving. But that cat is already out of the bag, and as I alluded to earlier they could also play this to their advantage (charging now is not a money-grab, it's simply a matter of keeping a valuable service viable).
- Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.
- They are failing because they can't even ask people to pay for their service. They skipped that and went directly to we are shutting down our servers in 90 days.
  DHH needs to give them some scream therapy about business models. The one he does about asking your customers to pay for your service.
- From "build something people want" to "built something people want" to "can't monetize 2 million users."
  Any other examples of this?
- "For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service."
  Not a bad hypothesis, one I see regularly but 90 days to close sure illustrates the downside and value of searching for that monetization model earlier rather than later.
- sucks to have this ending after all your efforts. Xmarks was a great product. Hats off to you and your team and good luck in your next adventure.
- 2m users * 1% conversion rate * $10/yr = $100k = probably not enough for a VC-backed startup.
  My suspicion is that because users just used the browser's internal bookmarks they couldn't easily add affordances that would draw attention, leaving no surface on which to advertise. I guess this is one advantage that delicious had, although breaking the bookmarking paradigm to do so was very painful in other ways.
  I no longer believe startups who claim their value proposition is "the data will be really valuable someday."
- Years ago, I bookmarked expansively. I found I never used most of the bookmarks and many of the bit-rotted silently so that, when I did try to follow a bookmark, it no longer worked.
  I found googling worked better than maintaining personal bookmarks, so Google has become my "bookmark" service.
- I thought marks only offered the folders that the browsers used natively.
  This was always an issue for adoption in delicious, anyway.

Oct

2010

Xmarks not quite dead yet

news.ycombinator.com/item

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Xmarks

Xmarks might not be quite dead yet but it probably will and should be.
They seem really attached to the idea that the data (or as they ponderously call it, 'the corpus') they have is very valuable. $9 million (with an impressive $2 mil/year burn rate) later they haven't figured out a way to extract any of that elusive value.
Browser bookmark sync is becoming a built-in feature in many popular browsers. Cross-browser support is an edge case that overlaps with the functionality of a number of web-based bookmarking services which generally offer a richer and more useful feature set than in-browser bookmarking.
In the period of about a week they've persuaded fewer than 30k of their users to maybe pay them $10/yr. This is probably not all that surprising given the above and the fact they've already announced that should they run into difficulties, they'll simply give up. Short of Stockholm Syndrome, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to rely on their service going forward, even if someone is foolish enough to buy them out.
I love pinboard.in - I signed up when they were charging about $1 per signup and it works perfectly for me, the guy that runs it even setup a feature on my request and within about 24 hours of me requesting it! (tag specific user RSS feeds).
1 more annotation(s)...
- I like to be able to use whatever browser I want, whenever I want, use the browser's native bookmarking, and have new bookmarks show up in whatever browser I run next (not to mention show up on iOS Safari).
  Bookmark something in Chrome, leave my desk, check the bookmark on the iPad. Surf on the iPad on the train, bookmark some things, review those bookmarks in Firefox on the PC.
  The built-in bookmark syncs don't do this, unless you're willing to only use a single browser on everything.
  Xmarks does this. If you're a developer using multiple browsers, seems like Xmarks would be essential kit.

Oct

2010

Xmarks Blog » Xmarks is Dead. Long Live Xmarks?

blog.xmarks.com/?p=1945

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freemium Xmarks

We were one of the first add-ons to turn on the Mozilla “contributions” feature, allowing users to make a suggested $7 donation when they download Xmarks. Participation was abysmal… less that 0.001% of users contributed. (Interestingly, most of the contributions came from Europe, not from the US.)
For Xmarks, 2% of our two million users paying $10 a year would generate $400,000 of annual revenue. Today Xmarks costs over $2 million a year to run. For two developers in a garage this could be a nice business, but we had big aspirations (per point #1) and have already invested $9 million dollars to create the technology and grow the data corpus. If $2MM / year seems crazy high to you, remember that we staffed senior engineers to keep up with changes on multiple browsers and operating systems, plus a team building our search features.
3 more annotation(s)...
- UPDATE: Many comments point out that Xmarks is the only game in town for cross-browser sync; that’s something that Firefox or Chrome can’t hold a candle to. Absolutely true! Point #3 is still relevant to our business prospects, as over 75% of our current users are Firefox-only.
- The overwhelming positive user support from all of you, combined with strong interest by companies looking to take over Xmarks, means that the service might just find a ninth life. Please stay tuned.
- If there were to be 1 company you guys should vet yourselves out to is Dropbox. Personally I would pay 20 a month for expanded storage and a secure place to hold my bookmarks, passwords and browsing history for syncing on the go.
  
  I’ve set my pledge on pledgebank as well. Best of luck because I would hate to lose this service. It’s made my working process seamless and would find it a very deep loss if you were to go under.

Sep

2010

Xmarks Dies: Freemium’s Just Another Word for Nothin’ Left To Lose | BNET

www.bnet.com/...5793

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Xmarks

- distribute product or services to customers
- attract customers in the first place
- support customers when something goes wrong
- manage the process of business
- generate enough revenue to cover costs, salaries, and profit for owners
Unfortunately for them, and too many other entrepreneurs, particularly in high tech, viable business models are often far more difficult to develop than the software they are to support.

Social Bookmarking Start-Up Xmarks Closes Down With Classy Goodbye | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

kara.allthingsd.com/...before-closing-down-with-class

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Xmarks

The San Francisco-based company–which had been called Foxmarks initially–had been seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.
Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.