http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/
Alarmed and not a little bit furious that I nearly sent him some deeply embarrassing musings, I tell the support person about the issue, noting that it is a serious breach of privacy (and an obvious one, given that I noticed it in all of ten seconds). They say to file another ticket.
I never reality liked Evernote
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html
Via Daring Fireball
To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind — to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).
http://bootstrapped.fm/bootstrapped-episode-29-theres-always-one-more-year/
school lunches, fast food, Ludum Dare, game development, Minecraft, Userscape’s new employee, taking a vacation, 2013 year in review, amount of revenue to have before hiring full-time, the first two years of running a software consultancy, being too open about your employee information, Laracon 2014, and running an online retail shop.
http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/best-places-for-bootstrappers-to-live/354
Over on our forums there's a great thread on the best places for bootstrappers to live. This is one of our older posts but it still keeps getting interesting new additions.
This is something I've been looking into myself a bit. It's really hard when you can live anywhere to actually get up the conviction to go anywhere :)
http://blog.wilshipley.com/2013/12/my-doom-20th-anniversary-stories.html
And Carmack responded, the way he does, by just sending me all the source code. I don't think there were any other words in the message
Why is every Carmack story so good?
http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/
A rather fascinating look inside the operations of a drop ship ecommerce store. Me and Andrey discussed this on this weeked Bootstrapped.fm episode. I'd like to try running one of these someday.
http://swombat.com/2013/12/27/investment-increases-risk
For example, building a business worth £20m is a pretty amazing achievement, but if you've raised £10m from a VC to get there, with 2x preferential rights you would be wiped out and result in very little money for you as a founder.
This is not a debate on Obamacare! Just our experience going through the process as a small company. Your milage may vary, etc etc.
Early in the fall we received a notice from our healthcare provider Aetna that we wouldn't be able to renew the plan we were currently on. It did not conform (though they didn't say why) with the new laws.
Fear level was pretty high at UserScape HQ (meaning Jamie and myself). Every employee at UserScape has a family covered under the plan. We got in touch with our insurance agent and were told they wouldn't have any information at all until November 1st. The insurance companies weren't releasing information to them before then.
So we pretty much just waited around with nothing to do. Most articles we were reading estimated increases for small business of at least 10%, though some said as high as 30%. We pay 100% of all premiums for UserScape employee's so a 30% increase is a significant expense. In 2013 we'll pay about $71,000 in healthcare premiums for our 4 active plans (that's freaking crazy BTW).
In the 5 years we've offered a healthcare plan here rates have never gone down. They've gone up every year, usually at least 5% or more. To say we were expecting the worst is an understatement.
November 1st came and they still didn't have information. We waited more, constantly checking in.
A few weeks later we finally had some details. The plans offered were pretty shocking. They had nearly the same coverage with a few minor tweaks and a slightly higher max out of pocket limits. The prices came in 23% less than last year, a savings of $16,000.
We went even deeper into panic mode as this surely must be in error! We'd now have to get that straightened out all while working with the deadline of January 1st. That was when our plans expired and we'd need to obtain coverage before then to avoid any lapse and general chaos.
We double checked and not to our surprise the agent said yes, something is wrong. They sent new plans. These had a savings of $7,000. Still great on paper, if not slightly disappointing. Like thinking you had all 6 lotto numbers and finding out it was only 5 (it's like that right?).
We prepared to move forward, but a day later the agent emailed us yet again. The original numbers were in fact correct. They were sure this time. Hopefully.
A few more back and forth emails and we were able to get our renewal in place at the 23% savings level. Truly amazing.
You can't underestimate the importance that kind of savings has on a small business. During this back and forth we were in talks to bring on another employee. While we were going to do the hire either way, this savings makes that process just a little bit more comfortable. For other lower margin businesses these savings are the difference between hiring and firing.
I know there's plenty of stories out there about people paying more. I can't speak for anyone else, but for us at least the new law seems to be a positive so far.
You see a lot of press these days about seed/VC money, 2 million for this and 5 million for that. I thought it would be interesting to add up what it actually cost us to build a sophisticated web application using the latest technologies (BackBone, Laravel, Coffeescript, Less, message queues, email parsing, Facebook integration) and a top notch team. The results are interesting.
I suspect most people who read this will find it either amazingly expensive or remarkably cheap! I think we did a great job and kept the costs within what we could afford. Luckily, we already have a successful product so we could be our own Angel in this endeavor and not rely on any outside funding. In fact, if we were a true startup we could have done it a lot cheaper, more on that farther down.
These numbers are all ballpark, I looked up the figures, but didn’t add it all up to the penny. These costs are for the last half a year or so that we’ve worked on Snappy. Another important note is that we were not working on Snappy that entire period. There was the continuing work on HelpSpot, support on HelpSpot and Taylor was working on Laravel. I’ve taken that into account a bit in the numbers, again ballpark.
Obviously, this is most software companies largest expense and no exception for us. I couldn’t ask for a better team and wouldn’t trade these guys for anything.
I considered rolling this into payroll, but it’s so shockingly huge I decided to break it out!
This is just “stuff”. We have a small office, hardware, 401K matches, time off, software, etc.
I spoke previously about my desire to implement a great design and to have a consistent brand experience for Snappy from logo through the app. This was the most (by several times) we ever paid an outside company. I think, if you have the means, it’s money well spent.
Note: this ballpark design cost posted with the permission of Focus Lab
Snappy is wired together with a lot of other great services. The monthly fees for these are shockingly affordable.
This is only an estimate, they haven’t started the work yet on the TOS and privacy policy.
This is also an estimate. We currently pay about $2,000 in errors and omissions insurance. The extra product, extra revenue (hopefully) and being a product where we host the data will add to the cost. This number could be higher, I’m being optimistic!
So far we’ve spent very little on servers. We already have an existing infrastructure and partnership with EngineHosting. They’ve just been running everything on a custom VM cluster for us during the beta and it’s been very smooth so far.
A note here, that we did initial play with AWS when we thought we may use some of their other infrastructure pieces but it was so complicated, expensive and slow that in the end it just made sense to use a more traditional (I guess if you can call a VM cluster traditional) setup.
Yeah, so before Snappy was called Snappy it was going to be called SnapReply. I need to write up that change in direction another time, but the short version of this story is that we paid $2,000 to a domain squatter for a domain we’re not using :)
That its not nearly as expensive to build a top notch product as all this money flying around makes it seem. Sure, with some VC money we could have hired more people but that doesn’t always equate to things getting done faster. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. Especially in a new product where there’s a lot of wandering around. Trying something, seeing if it works, reworking it and so on.
This isn’t to say there’s not a place for VC or even that under some scenarios I might not take some myself. But it’s so affordable to build a great app these days that it just makes sense to build it and get it rolling on your own if at all possible. See if it works, see if people like it and if you then want to take on some investors to scale it, pursue that from a more strategically advantageous position. Or don’t and just be profitable!
Update: The kids have started a Hacker News thread. I’ll follow up on comments over there
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Deciding to build a second product is a very difficult decision. Especially when you’re a small bootstrap company. While we do well with our main product, HelpSpot, we don’t have a lot of cash to just throw around.
So in planning Snappy, I knew we had to maximize our dollars. I’d much rather spend money on the top notch developers we’ve hired than other consultants or services.
However, this conflicted with another goal I had for the product. That it have a very refined, strong, fully fleshed out brand. From the logo, to the colors, website, vibe, stickers, everything. One cohesive brand. Not a logo by one person and a website from another.
OK, that’s a reasonable goal but there’s more. I wanted to work with a top tier design firm. One that specialized in branding, but also had the in house chops to do all the other elements we’d need. This time there would be no half measures.
We’ve worked with a lot of great designers in the past, but for this project I felt we needed to look for someone with a very specific design style and set of skills. So I went looking around at what was going on in design right now. That’s when I became addicted to Dribbble.
What Dribbble provides is more than just a way to find designers. The real magic is it gives you insight into what the designers are working on right now. Design is art and people have natural ebbs and flows. Dribbble lets you see not just people who have done great work in the past (like a portfolio), but those who are at the top of their game right now. Today. That is incredibly powerful.
So now we can find great designers, but to maximize their value we need to pick one with a wide reach. This is the key to making an expensive, top tier designer affordable. A designer with incredible reach can turn your design expense into an advertising channel. Letting you apply both your design and advertising budget to this one aspect of your project. This is risky, but also has a huge potential payoff as it did for us.
In our case we ended up choosing Focus Lab. Not only is their work amazing, but the designers have a huge following on Dribbble and Twitter as well as a foothold in the web development community.
So what does finding a team with great reach bring? How can it cover the $25,000 - $75,000 you’re likely to pay for a full boat design project?
Let’s start with this. In 7 years of selling HelpSpot we’ve never generated as much buzz, sign ups or interest with any of dozens of advertising campaigns as our work with Focus Lab has for Snappy. The power of great design to inspire and motivate people is astounding.
The key is to shape this power and focus it. In our case, I was very clear with Focus Lab that I wanted them to speak about Snappy as much as possible from day 1. That the opportunity to leverage their reach was a significant aspect of why I thought they were a good fit. That their amazing work shouldn’t be buried in some project management app, but shared as we went so people could follow our progress.
You can see the results of this collaboration on Dribbble. Note how each image references our landing page and has a call to action to sign up: http://dribbble.com/ianlandsman/buckets/72071-Snappy
The best part about this is it proves to be a truly win/win scenario. With the designers posting on Dribbble and Twitter along with a link to our landing page we get huge prelaunch sign ups while they get increased exposure. Their profile is raised on those networks by showcasing their talents and we get to highlight them and recommend them via our network as we publicly share information on what we’re working on.
This path obviously won’t work if you have a budget of $0 :) but if you have a few more dollars than that this path can be truly transformative. There’s simply no way putting $10,000 into adwords or The Deck could buy you this type of publicity and engagement.
While in our case we had a healthy size budget, I think this can also work at smaller levels. The real key is to find a designer with amazing talent and the desire to share their work. One who gets the power of sharing and is willing to put in the extra effort to do so in a way that provides these additional benefits to all parties.
When we launched HelpSpot 7 years ago we had 80 people on the beta list. Snappy has thousands with little work on our end other than hiring a great team of designers. In fact, we haven’t even announced anything to our existing customer base at all yet.
It’s difficult to estimate the value of this, but acquiring this list via traditional methods would have been many times the cost. Hundreds of thousands of dollars probably and it would have been a much lower quality group compared with the excited (perhaps overly excited!) group we’ve been able to gather.
If you have an exciting and interesting project, this method of collaboration with a design team is some of the best money you can spend, with bang for the buck that’s off the charts. In essence, you’re getting world class design for free and you simply can’t beat that.
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