Pinboard Acquires Delicious
CORE FOUNDER LESSON / TAKEAWAY
“Pinboard acquires Delicious: Maciej Cegłowski proves that charging users directly from day one outlasts free ad-supported giants.”
In this 2017 acquisition retrospective, @cjbprime reflects on the journey of bootstrapping and successfully selling their business. Core insight: Pinboard acquires Delicious: Maciej Cegłowski proves that charging users directly from day one outlasts free ad-supported giants.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Unsolicited buyer inquiries versus running a deliberate auction process require very different negotiation leverage.
Bootstrapping for years without external capital provides extreme freedom, but exits are often triggered by energy depletion as much as financial gain.
Retaining ownership of code and operations creates pride, but transitioning to an acquirer requires letting go of absolute autonomy.
Community Debate Themes:
Hacker News peers debated transaction structures (cash vs earnout), founder tax strategies, and life after liquidating a long-term indie asset.
CATEGORY Startup Exits →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 800 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 227 comments
I built a five-year career of self-employment on the back of a Mac app called Pukka which was itself built upon Delicious.
http://codesorcery.net/2006/02/26/hello-world
I turned the interest in the app into my first piece of commercial software which, coming from an open source and free software background, was actually pretty daunting. I timidly started charging five bucks in the pre-App Store days, before eventually raising the price over time to make it more sustainable.
http://codesorcery.net/2006/05/03/so-really-whats-the-deal
I had ups and downs, launched a second app (Meerkat, for SSH tunneling), but eventually realized I wasn't really an indie product person as much as I was a people and services one, so I ended up doing about 80% consulting and 20% Mac software, including Pukka.
I eventually ended up folding up shop after I went to work for Mapbox full-time in 2011.
http://codesorcery.net/2012/09/06/sunset
This is something Maciej even wrote about.
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/243511937722376192
So I'll always have a spot in my heart for Delicious, and this seems a fitting and appropriate end. I'm so glad its content will remain available in perpetuity.
I honestly didn't realize delicious was still around. It felt really groundbreaking at the time. I loved the ability to tag and search for links by tags to find new interesting content. Perhaps with introduction news mashups like digg it didn't feel as useful anymore. I stopped using delicious soon after it was acquired by yahoo.
Site has been bounced around a bit since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
"The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.[2][3][4] Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011,[5] and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year.[6] In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc.[7] In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.[8]"
I was a longtime Delicious user, but it really fell apart after the Yahoo acquisition. I'm happy to hear that it won't disappear.
I've recently switched to raindrop.io, which is an excellent replacement. Bookmarking serves two purposes for me:
1) It provides a way to record sites I don't visit often, which I hope I'll be able to find easily in the future if needed.
2) It provides me with easy access to the sites I visit regularly on all devices, without restricting me to a specific browser, and with an aesthetically pleasing and intuitive UI like Speed Dial
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-dial-2/jpfpebmajhhopeonhlcgidhclcccjcik?hl=en
I want the record of these two kinds of pages to live in one place, and while Delicious and Pinboard were close, I felt that they never quite met that need.
https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/ "If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API." https://del.icio.us/export "We're sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible."
This demonstrates that there is justice in the world. I love it.
Been using Pinboard since the strange pricing model. It is the only "cloud" service I use, and ever since I wrote some little utilities for searching the automated backup I keep from the command line, I actually mainly use the service because there are tools for easily adding to the store from the browser and an Iphone app.
In general, Pinboard is my idea of how a successful, solid internet service business looks. Find a niche, occupy it well enough that people want to give you money, and continually make it better for the users. (That last bit is important - Google used to be good for me as a user, but they've "improved" to the point that I don't want them in my life.)