Glassboard Changes

I’ve been watching with interest as Justin Williams works to turn Glassboard into a sustainable service. It’s not profitable or even break-even at this point — but he’s making changes to turn this around.

Those changes do mean that people using Glassboard for free will be more limited than they were. For example, boards created by non-paying users will be limited to five members — but people can buy a basic membership for $1/month and get up to 25 members.

That’s reasonable. If something isn’t worth $1/month to me, then it’s not worth my time at all.

A few people are complaining on Twitter, of course. And some of the complaints seem to be based on the same magical internet thinking that has led to so much doom and heartbreak — that if you make a whole bunch of people happy by giving them wonderful free things, you’ll be rolling in dough.

And when that thinking is contradicted by facts and logic, that magical thinking says: you should have given them more and even better wonderful free things, and it would have worked out.

I like how Justin is handling all this. He’s direct and clear. Some may take this as bluntness, and it’s true that Justin might never get accepted to the diplomatic corps. But it’s because he doesn’t care about being liked so much as providing a great service. And that’s what we should want him to care about.

I use Glassboard all day every day. Our internal Q Branch communication goes through Glassboard. We have a board for Vesper beta testers. Chris Parrish and I have a board where we work on The Record. Seattle Xcoders has a board. My family has several boards.

I like that it’s simple and private, that there are no ads, and that we’re not being tracked for nefarious reasons. It’s no Google or Facebook where the users are the product — it’s an honest service that is itself the product. As it should be.

I can imagine being in Justin’s shoes. As a fellow indie doing a hard job, he deserves our best wishes. And, if you find the service useful — as I most certainly do — it deserves your financial support. Because we developers all know that wonderful things are not free — or, if they are, they don’t last.