I agree that it's a very nice thing he did. But the ability to build & maintain a fanbase is key here. I wish him the best of luck with that.
Right now, though, I fear they're missing an opportunity. They should least figure out how to get people to sign up for a mailing list, or give them a Facebook page to like, or make it easy to share the page via social media... anything, really, to keep a connection to the audience you have right now and using that to get a bigger one. They appear to be doing nothing of the sort yet, which may lead to an initial boom followed by nothing, just as if the intersection they were playing at had gone from a busy one to an empty one.
With RL busking you can always find a crowd, but online it's not always that easy to get or retain attention. I mean, there's a reason why business people like to see graphs of user numbers that are increasing steadily.
I say this because I want to see him succeed. I believe that this model can work here, but only if he can build and retain the fanbase to support it. It's no different than trying to make sure that you always have a crowd to play for. Busking on an empty street won't get you anywhere, after all.
EDIT: It took me a while to figure out why I missed it. I went there and found nothing at all but an email address. I looked through everything and found that PayPal is serving a 1x1 tracking pixel via https. Odd.
Ghostery didn't see that, either, and many things have default exceptions for https. Strange. Finally noticed that the Wufoo thing was getting eaten by NoScript. You can't even tell that something is missing, you have to whitelist them to get it to show up. So, this probably only affects some of the HN folks, it wouldn't affect a more general audience.
Right now, though, I fear they're missing an opportunity. They should least figure out how to get people to sign up for a mailing list, or give them a Facebook page to like, or make it easy to share the page via social media... anything, really, to keep a connection to the audience you have right now and using that to get a bigger one. They appear to be doing nothing of the sort yet, which may lead to an initial boom followed by nothing, just as if the intersection they were playing at had gone from a busy one to an empty one.
With RL busking you can always find a crowd, but online it's not always that easy to get or retain attention. I mean, there's a reason why business people like to see graphs of user numbers that are increasing steadily.
I say this because I want to see him succeed. I believe that this model can work here, but only if he can build and retain the fanbase to support it. It's no different than trying to make sure that you always have a crowd to play for. Busking on an empty street won't get you anywhere, after all.
I wish him all the best.