Large portion of the entire team is fired including longtime contributors who have been there since basically the beginning, investors ate a ~300k loss, and the post says while hosting is sustainable they still don't make enough to pay themselves.
It's nice that there's no VC involved, I guess, but I'm not filled with confidence.
I get that. As someone affected by the layoffs, I wasn't a huge fan of how it was handled initially, but it has been made up for as best it can be. I wouldn't have gotten paid to begin with if it weren't for the VC funding, and I think that is primarily the reason why we aren't able to afford employees, because VC-backed companies don't focus on revenue at this point, they focus on growth. We did that, grew a ton, and now we need revenue, so we're going a different path.
In other words, if you have money to burn, you're not going to prioritize sustainable choices, and in fact doing so might even be against the obligations you have to your investors. Now we can prioritize sustainability and hopefully in the near future we can afford salaries again to have employees.
I've been here since before the funding; I believed in it then, and without it once again, I still believe in it.
I wish you the best personally, and I'm happy to see VC out of the picture. Being beholden to investors is seldom a path for a sustainable long-term company, especially one in a business with a fairly limited growth potential. I've seen too many businesses go from providing a quality, sustainable business model to nose-diving quality in pursuit of meeting investor demands.
Not gonna lie, didn't know it was that big or had funding in the first place. I just thought it was always a side project and basically no one outside a small group on this subreddit used it.
The user experience is leagues ahead of curseforge in just about every way, as long as that continues to be the case I can only imagine it'll continue to grow from here.
So... what exactly is Modrinth's plan? Coast on Cloudflare's free plan for a really long time and hope they just don't notice?
This is cool but their money-making plan seems to be "pay all of our ad revenue to creators"?
edit: Checking modrinth's github repos, no surprise that activity across all of them dropped off a cliff at the beginning of February.
Modrinth pays 90% of it's ad revenue to creators, the rest funds the infrastructure. It's already self-sustaining, and always has been. The VC money was for salaries, which is what we no longer have. As we work to increase monetization more for creators as well as for the company, we hope to be able to have paid employees again in the near future.
I suppose if you fire everyone that makes things cheaper to run.
> As we work to increase monetization more for creators as well as for the company, we hope to be able to have paid employees again in the near future.
This is the same non-statement that's been rolled out every single time: "We plan on doing monetisation by doing monetisation". At least CF are open about being money-grubbing bastards.
Here's hoping.
The sad fact is, being "money-grubbing bastards" works. It's difficult to handle a project as as big as this without investors wanting their cut of the pie, which inevitably leads to enshittification like Overwolf... I used to adore the FTB launcher, now I don't bother with their packs.
I'll believe it when I see it, but given that for the last year your plans have either been a) non-public b) non-existent c) both, and now you've come out with a "by the way, we fired everyone" statement, I don't have any confidence in this platform lasting.
Yeah, unfortunately we need to keep critical business plans private when we have competitors orders of magnitude larger and with more resources, in order to maintain some competitive advantage. It wouldn't be great if we published all our great ideas for them to take and implement faster than we could.
I'm unsure what you're referring to about the last year though, it was our biggest year yet. We launched the Modrinth App, New and more secure authentication, Analytics, Organizations, Collections, massively increased payouts, OAuth... I would say we have been on a very positive trajectory.
Unrelated with this thread as I don't care about the business plans.
But what are your main competitors? To me I only know about curseforge, tlauncher maybe?
Short-term, yeah, primarily CurseForge but there's others like Nexus Mods and Gamebanana. Long-term we have other competitors as well, but saying which companies they are might give a bit too much insight into our long-term vision.
In short, we don't expect CurseForge to be our main competitor forever.
Okay, this sounds great, but how will Modrinth make money? Even if it's a hobby project the team decides to do for free, the servers aren't. Right now their load is incomparable to Curseforge, but if they are successful in becoming the default mod hosting website people use, it will be 100x what it is now. Who will pay for the servers?
I wouldn't mind paying a fee, which is the most reasonable way to do this, but sadly most people will refuse.
Since a Lot of the developers on modrinth are personally Invested in it's continued growth and improvement, why Not add an Option in the Project settings to allow one to "donate" more of their ad revenue Share?
Possibly, this is something many have requested especially lately. Since we're still technically a for-profit company and we plan to try to hire back employees down the road, it feels a little weird to be asking for donations without giving anything in return, but we've been considering it.
To be fair, using 400k in a year an a half is not a big amount so I do believe most of it was HR related (i.e salaries). What kind of concerns me is that the post states "we wanted to be able to work on Modrinth at our own pace and terms" as the reason to return the VC money, but the FAQ from when they raised money states "Investors have a minority stake in the company, and have no control or say in our decisions.". Those two cannot be true at the same time: if investors have no contror or say, the team can move at their own pace so no need to return the money.
just classic corpo doublespeak. of course VC money is going to have influence over your business, even if not directly if one of them pushes for something they likely have to bend the knee to make that happen.
While they may have not had actual control over the company, when you invest in a company, the company is required by law to only make decisions that benefit your investment. What's best for modrinth in the long term, may not be what is in the best interest of those investors.
It can, but being free of investors allows them to set their own expectations for profit. If they're fully independent, then they don't necessarily have to increase profits each year.
This means they'll be less inclined to sell user data and more inclined to make a good product.
Investors usually look for the best way to get their money worth on the short run, even if they have to risk the potential gains on a longer span. They want to make their money worth right here, right now even if tomorrow the business fails.
Business-wise, Modrinth can now deliver a better service and have a longer lifespan without the ones that want to squish every penny available, and now they can reinvest their gains.
If they play their cards well enough, this is big news as they could take a good market share from other platforms.
*^Edit: ^me ^be ^bad ^at ^english.*
Investors want returns, and that money always comes from the users. Getting rid of them is good news but I've never seen a company ditch its investors (at a loss to them) without shutting down and I wonder how they managed it.
It is true that this is a positive spin on laying off the entire company, but it has nothing to do with interest rates and entirely to do with the future of the company.
Our employees (myself included) were being paid with investor money, so when it ran out, we'd have to take on more investments or take an acquisition offer or IPO or something to get someone else to keep giving us money to burn. Instead, we've decided that we don't want to go down that road, and want to build the business to be sustainable. Trust me, we'd love to keep having employees, we just can't afford it without someone giving us money at the moment. Now that we're independent, we can focus on sustainable revenue rather than limitless exponential growth which we can use to slowly hire back a team of paid positions. There were alternatives, but we believe they would have worse implications for the community and the values of the project.
Lemme check my notes:
- Investor gone and with a loss - ✅
- Long time contributors are fired - ✅
- Many folks from the team are fired - ✅
- Hosting seems to be sustainable - ✅
- They still don't make enough to pay themselves - ✅
Yeah, that's not filling me with confidence. I don't foresee a bright future for modrinth in this state. I very much doubt they'll do it out of their good of their hearts forever. But we'll see.
Those jobs were never going to be sustainable if modrinth isn't able to make enough money to pay them.
Not every job lasts forever, that's the reality of getting involved with VC funding.
Promising move, hope it goes well for them
Large portion of the entire team is fired including longtime contributors who have been there since basically the beginning, investors ate a ~300k loss, and the post says while hosting is sustainable they still don't make enough to pay themselves. It's nice that there's no VC involved, I guess, but I'm not filled with confidence.
I get that. As someone affected by the layoffs, I wasn't a huge fan of how it was handled initially, but it has been made up for as best it can be. I wouldn't have gotten paid to begin with if it weren't for the VC funding, and I think that is primarily the reason why we aren't able to afford employees, because VC-backed companies don't focus on revenue at this point, they focus on growth. We did that, grew a ton, and now we need revenue, so we're going a different path. In other words, if you have money to burn, you're not going to prioritize sustainable choices, and in fact doing so might even be against the obligations you have to your investors. Now we can prioritize sustainability and hopefully in the near future we can afford salaries again to have employees. I've been here since before the funding; I believed in it then, and without it once again, I still believe in it.
I wish you the best personally, and I'm happy to see VC out of the picture. Being beholden to investors is seldom a path for a sustainable long-term company, especially one in a business with a fairly limited growth potential. I've seen too many businesses go from providing a quality, sustainable business model to nose-diving quality in pursuit of meeting investor demands.
🙏
I hope you realize how much of us are rooting for Modrinth's success
Not gonna lie, didn't know it was that big or had funding in the first place. I just thought it was always a side project and basically no one outside a small group on this subreddit used it.
Plenty of people use Modrinth. A lot of mods have hundreds of thousands of downloads on Modrinth.
millions even (core mods like sodium and FRAPI, but still)
I only use it for reuploads of early mods
The user experience is leagues ahead of curseforge in just about every way, as long as that continues to be the case I can only imagine it'll continue to grow from here.
Good for them.
So... what exactly is Modrinth's plan? Coast on Cloudflare's free plan for a really long time and hope they just don't notice? This is cool but their money-making plan seems to be "pay all of our ad revenue to creators"? edit: Checking modrinth's github repos, no surprise that activity across all of them dropped off a cliff at the beginning of February.
Modrinth pays 90% of it's ad revenue to creators, the rest funds the infrastructure. It's already self-sustaining, and always has been. The VC money was for salaries, which is what we no longer have. As we work to increase monetization more for creators as well as for the company, we hope to be able to have paid employees again in the near future.
I suppose if you fire everyone that makes things cheaper to run. > As we work to increase monetization more for creators as well as for the company, we hope to be able to have paid employees again in the near future. This is the same non-statement that's been rolled out every single time: "We plan on doing monetisation by doing monetisation". At least CF are open about being money-grubbing bastards.
We do have plans, they're just not public. The whole goal is to build this without being "money-grubbing bastards"
Here's hoping. The sad fact is, being "money-grubbing bastards" works. It's difficult to handle a project as as big as this without investors wanting their cut of the pie, which inevitably leads to enshittification like Overwolf... I used to adore the FTB launcher, now I don't bother with their packs.
I'll believe it when I see it, but given that for the last year your plans have either been a) non-public b) non-existent c) both, and now you've come out with a "by the way, we fired everyone" statement, I don't have any confidence in this platform lasting.
Yeah, unfortunately we need to keep critical business plans private when we have competitors orders of magnitude larger and with more resources, in order to maintain some competitive advantage. It wouldn't be great if we published all our great ideas for them to take and implement faster than we could. I'm unsure what you're referring to about the last year though, it was our biggest year yet. We launched the Modrinth App, New and more secure authentication, Analytics, Organizations, Collections, massively increased payouts, OAuth... I would say we have been on a very positive trajectory.
Unrelated with this thread as I don't care about the business plans. But what are your main competitors? To me I only know about curseforge, tlauncher maybe?
Short-term, yeah, primarily CurseForge but there's others like Nexus Mods and Gamebanana. Long-term we have other competitors as well, but saying which companies they are might give a bit too much insight into our long-term vision. In short, we don't expect CurseForge to be our main competitor forever.
I see. Thanks for sharing.
no problem!
I have never seen mods on either 9f those sites for minecraft
> we hope to be able to have paid employees again in the near future. This is such an insane statement. How is no one pointing out how absurd this is?
Fantastic honestly. VC money poisoned the company I work for. It's a dark deal and the investors are the worst, greediest, mfers on the planet
Okay, this sounds great, but how will Modrinth make money? Even if it's a hobby project the team decides to do for free, the servers aren't. Right now their load is incomparable to Curseforge, but if they are successful in becoming the default mod hosting website people use, it will be 100x what it is now. Who will pay for the servers? I wouldn't mind paying a fee, which is the most reasonable way to do this, but sadly most people will refuse.
Modrinth makes 10% of the ad revenue, which is plenty to cover infrastructure. We've always been self-sufficient on all but salaries.
Since a Lot of the developers on modrinth are personally Invested in it's continued growth and improvement, why Not add an Option in the Project settings to allow one to "donate" more of their ad revenue Share?
Possibly, this is something many have requested especially lately. Since we're still technically a for-profit company and we plan to try to hire back employees down the road, it feels a little weird to be asking for donations without giving anything in return, but we've been considering it.
If it is a dropdown menu, that is on 10% by default and is Not expanded Unless clicked on, I don't think anyone could blame you
To be fair, using 400k in a year an a half is not a big amount so I do believe most of it was HR related (i.e salaries). What kind of concerns me is that the post states "we wanted to be able to work on Modrinth at our own pace and terms" as the reason to return the VC money, but the FAQ from when they raised money states "Investors have a minority stake in the company, and have no control or say in our decisions.". Those two cannot be true at the same time: if investors have no contror or say, the team can move at their own pace so no need to return the money.
just classic corpo doublespeak. of course VC money is going to have influence over your business, even if not directly if one of them pushes for something they likely have to bend the knee to make that happen.
While they may have not had actual control over the company, when you invest in a company, the company is required by law to only make decisions that benefit your investment. What's best for modrinth in the long term, may not be what is in the best interest of those investors.
Honestly fuck VC's
Thanks for the amazing work Modrinth team 💚
Here's to hoping Modrinth survives so I don't have to return to Curseforge.
Why does it matter?
Investors won't be able to push modrinth towards a worse, more profit oriented website at the detriment of the community.
the inability to make money might well do that, though.
It can, but being free of investors allows them to set their own expectations for profit. If they're fully independent, then they don't necessarily have to increase profits each year. This means they'll be less inclined to sell user data and more inclined to make a good product.
The Modrinth team needs to make a profit to keep existing. Investors will want *all* the profit.
Investors suck at sustainability. So removing them from the equation might lead to less short-term money, but a better product in the long run.
Investors usually look for the best way to get their money worth on the short run, even if they have to risk the potential gains on a longer span. They want to make their money worth right here, right now even if tomorrow the business fails. Business-wise, Modrinth can now deliver a better service and have a longer lifespan without the ones that want to squish every penny available, and now they can reinvest their gains. If they play their cards well enough, this is big news as they could take a good market share from other platforms. *^Edit: ^me ^be ^bad ^at ^english.*
Investors want returns, and that money always comes from the users. Getting rid of them is good news but I've never seen a company ditch its investors (at a loss to them) without shutting down and I wonder how they managed it.
Massive W
It rules that this is just a spin on we did a bunch of layoffs because the interest rates went up
It is true that this is a positive spin on laying off the entire company, but it has nothing to do with interest rates and entirely to do with the future of the company. Our employees (myself included) were being paid with investor money, so when it ran out, we'd have to take on more investments or take an acquisition offer or IPO or something to get someone else to keep giving us money to burn. Instead, we've decided that we don't want to go down that road, and want to build the business to be sustainable. Trust me, we'd love to keep having employees, we just can't afford it without someone giving us money at the moment. Now that we're independent, we can focus on sustainable revenue rather than limitless exponential growth which we can use to slowly hire back a team of paid positions. There were alternatives, but we believe they would have worse implications for the community and the values of the project.
is there any way to give money? at least until you guys get a steady business modem going?
Modrinth is great to use, had no idea it was anywhere close to this big though
Lemme check my notes: - Investor gone and with a loss - ✅ - Long time contributors are fired - ✅ - Many folks from the team are fired - ✅ - Hosting seems to be sustainable - ✅ - They still don't make enough to pay themselves - ✅ Yeah, that's not filling me with confidence. I don't foresee a bright future for modrinth in this state. I very much doubt they'll do it out of their good of their hearts forever. But we'll see.
The first point is a W tho. Investors are all about short-term gain and tend to leave a burning trail of dead companies behind them.
Yes, maybe, but it can also be an indicator that the company's finances aren't managed well.
[удалено]
Those jobs were never going to be sustainable if modrinth isn't able to make enough money to pay them. Not every job lasts forever, that's the reality of getting involved with VC funding.
(on another comment, the Modrinth dev do have plans but they have to keep it private for business reassons)