Also worth noting that according to Crunchbase, Soup received at least €80,000 in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. Yes, that's not a massive amount of money and it was a long time ago, but it...
Also worth noting that according to Crunchbase, Soup received at least €80,000 in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. Yes, that's not a massive amount of money and it was a long time ago, but it should still mean that they're not totally in control of the company, and that there are investors that have been expecting a return out of it eventually. Just reaching a break-even/moderately-profitable state probably wouldn't have been good enough.
Also worth noting that according to Crunchbase, Soup received at least €80,000 in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. Yes, that's not a massive amount of money and it was a long time ago, but it should still mean that they're not totally in control of the company, and that there are investors that have been expecting a return out of it eventually. Just reaching a break-even/moderately-profitable state probably wouldn't have been good enough.
I also see this article on TechCrunch talking about "soup.me" receiving $530,000 in VC in 2012. It specifically says that it's a "reboot service" of soup.io, but the soup.me site no longer exists, so I'm not certain. Their inactive Twitter account does have an identical logo and a location of Vienna (same as soup.io), so it's probably true that it's the same company.
That's definitely a much larger amount of VC, and would make it even less possible for "sustainable" to be an acceptable end goal for the site.
(repost of my comment from the HN thread)