Think Vitamin

Ryan I am impressed with all of your achievements including http://thinkvitamin.com/ but I am not sure your advice is as sound as your business. Your team has built a great brand globally over many years with the conference business, and in my opinion you have done a nice job leveraging that brand equity for your new startup. I do agree that if you are building a revenue focused company, you don't have to go to San Francisco. But it's hard to argue against how easy it is to raise money or get acquired in the valley vs anywhere else in the world. Look at how easy it was for Path and Instagram to raise money and to get cheap money at that. In other markets many VCs want to see revenue not just traction and that revenue can work against you and lower your valuation - making the money more expensive. For reference to Instagram, see this Chris Dixon interview with Kevin Systrom "He also talks about how the serendipity of Silicon Valley contributed to the formation Instagram, remembering a party that Dixon once threw in San Francisco where Systrom ended up meeting his key angel investors." http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/founder-stories-instagram-launch/

> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users. But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does. Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with? [1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-the-gateway-… for a great explanation

Thank you. You're very right -- it's so easy to get discouraged at the apparent lack of activity in any early product, no matter how jazzed you might be about it. It's also easy to get caught up in the "if you build it they will come" mindset. Sadly, this seems to be rarely the case, even for the best of products. (Though as adamtmca notes, it's certainly possible!) The first few 100 users of Forrst were all my friends and colleagues, and theirs as well. I invited folks I trusted would give me raw, honest feedback, and I trusted them to invite similarly-minded people. The next ~1,500 users came from this post: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/forrst-finds-designers-who-code-develop…

I have personal experience using a number of solutions for startups. I find the Recurly.JS solution to be one of the absolute easiest to get up and running without any actual programming. It's great for MVPs. http://js.recurly.com * Chargify * Recurly * CheddarGetter * Authorize.NET (and subsequently CyberSource) In addition to what I've mentioned from personal experience, there's a couple of previous posts on this subject worth checking out: * Poll: How do you bill recurring payments? - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2201363 * Ask HN: Recurring Billing Solutions - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438929 * Recurring Billing For Web Apps - http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/reoccurring-billing-for-web-apps/

Can you define developer looks? Might help to see the site. I'm not a designer by heart, but I just look at other sites in the same market for inspiration. Most of the sites I design come out looking pretty good. It's all about prioritizing. Take a look at this amazing post Allison House: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-arrange-interface-elements-4/

Nice. But definitely needs some designer love! Just the basics of C.A.R.P. would help a bunch: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-crap-is-your-site-design/

As usual the trick is to get inspired and not slavishly follow any particular implementation. Due to each site having differences in design and purpose, the only way is to do continuous a/b testing. http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/tag/call-to-actio… http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3073/a-b-testing-the-differen… http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-increase-sign-ups-by-200-perce…

No personal experience there, but I've heard a lot of good things about Forrst (http://forrst.com). As far as blogs go, Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com), A List Apart (http://alistapart.com), and Think Vitamin (http://thinkvitamin.com) come to mind.

I actually just looked up the video where they talk about this yesterday. Here it is: http://thinkvitamin.com/code/steve-huffman-on-lessons-learned-at-reddi… It's called "Lessons Learned at Reddit", and mostly talks about building and deploying large-scale web applications (the technical, not business side of things.) Well worth watching (there's also a transcript.)

Congrats! With 200 paying customers, you now have more than enough information to start tracking churn, CPA, life time value, life time profit, etc. You can turn those 200 paying customers into a lot more by accurately tracking your metrics and building from them. I recommend reading: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your…

There is a great talk by an (ex-) developer from Reddit about the technical background, scalability problems, caching, storing redundant data, queued offline computing etc. This might shed light on some questions in the comments here. http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/steve-huffman-on-lessons-learned-at-reddit…

Doing it yourself seems to be a great idea if you want all of your emails to end up in people's spam folders. Here's a great article explaining all of the reasons why you might end up that way: http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/ensuring-your-html-emails-… Much easier is to just use something like Constant Contact. Our emails seem to have a very high delivery rate through them. There's definitely some pain in the ass as they don't offer an API for syncing your userbase with their list, but if you're a small company for whom development time is valuable it's hard to beat.

This is an awesome little book and a bit of a secret, probably because the title, color scheme of the cover and relative thinness make it look less like something to be seriously and more of a "design for dummies" book. Not at all - it's a short and excellent distillation of core graphic design principles down to a few short fundamentals. An even shorter and online version of the same idea - the blog post on "how c.r.a.p. is your design?" on the role and usage of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity: http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-crap-is-your-site-desi…

also good for optimising that side of things is http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/serving-javascript-fast - and in fact Cal Henderson's whole book has been a great read - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596102356

As a professional of the tech field for the better of the last 7 years, I've had the opportunity to work with countless of these marketing, pr, bd people and to be frank, that "Greatness", I've only heard of, never actually witnessed it. I am aware that the services are needed and can bring some tremendous results when well executed, but at this point I've settled to learn some of this stuff on my own, rather than investing too much time in finding someone to trust with the responsibilities. Don't get me wrong, it would be absolutely awesome to find the rare pearl that the article mentions. But it's choosing between either continuously peruse for some Master of her domain, or rather investing all that energy into learning to do things myself. Obviously, some things are more sensitive than others and I still gladly defer to the experts (I won't touch the legal stuff without consult). For others however, I've noted that there have been times when I sat with someone who was supposed to advise me on marketing or BD, and they ended up learning more about these than I did by the end of our meeting. The whole thing reminds me of this post http://thinkvitamin.com/user-science/user-experience/ux-professional-i… where the author claimed that "UX Professional" isn't a job title. Ensues a torrent of comments with basically the same arguments that the present article emphasizes it's because you haven't seen a great one yet. I guess the question is then, how to find…

The author's point might have been better if there weren't a bunch of CSS libraries which have already solved this (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/ and http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/ to pick two). You wouldn't rewrite cstdlib why would you rewrite your CSS framework for every project? More over I think a lot of people neglect the real issue which is the high touch point of the Web, it's the multiple clients. You try to write cross-OS GUIs in Java and Swing and find out how easy that is (it isn't, obviously). The reason people advocate CSS is that it presents some real tangible benefits. CSS was specifically designed to present the semantics of layout rather than HTML tables. The author doesn't even talk about CSS tables (http://thinkvitamin.com/design/css/tables-the-next-evolution-in-css-la… Again I wish people would talk about technologies they were familiar with and had even made spent time with. You don't see me critiquing the algorithmic design of search engines because I didn't choose to follow CS down that route of expertise.

Yes, it really depends on your goals. Maybe this can help? http://thinkvitamin.com/business/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your…

Think Vitamin Radio: http://thinkvitamin.com/podcast/ { cast }: http://www.curlybracecast.com/ A Minute With Brendan: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/ FunctionSource Show: http://functionsource.com/tags/podcast/

Based on this competition [1] it seems that their business model is different subscription packages. The Gold package, for example, is supposedly $588 per year. [1] http://thinkvitamin.com/asides/guess-this-badge-and-win-a-free-one-yea…

The price they paid was $181k in Series A stock. The return to the investor after the company sold was something like $2 million. http://thinkvitamin.com/asides/aaron-patzer-on-how-to-take-your-start-… I think that's actually somewhat low as a dollar figure for the domain. It probably could have been sold for at least $300k in cash. Having Ron Conway and First Round Capital as your investors probably gets you better deals.

Looks like an implementation of some of the ideas in this article - http://thinkvitamin.com/business/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your… . Will definitely give your application a look when I create my own SaaS application.

These experiments by 37signals might give you some useful insights: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-increase-sign-ups-by-200-perce… http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2705-behind-the-scenes-37signalscom-red…

I'm with you on this. I think there should be a closer integration of design and development and not a 'handoff' from one to the other. We have been using the pattern that Ryan Singer discusses in this talk http://thinkvitamin.com/design/ryan-singer-fowa-london-2010/ It was reassuring to see that 37 signals used the same pattern as us.

mymint.com cost $3,000; mint.com cost $181k in Series A equity: "They offered him [previous owner of mint.com] equity in the company's Series A funding round rather than a cash payment, and assured him that he'd be the only New York financier they'd let in."[0] "I said, “I will give you $181 thousand in Series A equity. If we do well, you’ll get an asymmetric upside. If we go bankrupt, you’ll be in the situation as a preferred investor to get your money out first. I won’t let anyone else from New York into this round of financing"[1] [0]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10457870-36.html [1]: http://thinkvitamin.com/asides/aaron-patzer-on-how-to-take-your-start-…

The ThinkVitamin Radio podcast is top notch. http://thinkvitamin.com/podcast/

Carsonified team actually put up the original video of Fred's talk from FOWA 2010 Miami, with the same points: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/fred-wilsons-10-golden-principles-of-…

The interesting thing about the article is that the NoSQL movement has succeeded in reaching outside the database nerd circles! To get some insight in the actual trade-offs and uses cases for non-RDBMS database systems, this article is a much better read: http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/should-you-go-beyond-relational-databases/

Some of our customers at FreshBooks remember use from the days the product was named after the company name: 2ndSite. That name has all sorts of problems, not least the website (http://www.secondsite.biz/) so at the top of 2006 they decided to rebrand. Well, that's putting it lightly. They actually murdered the brand: http://www.brandmurder.com/ For those of you curious about how we chose FreshBooks as the new brand, Mike wrote all about it in ThinkVitamin: http://thinkvitamin.com/single/features/how-to-name-your-company/ P.S. Pro tip: .biz is not .hip. ;) -- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks

Ryan Carson shared stats for DropSend a couple of years ago on Vitamin: http://thinkvitamin.com/business/will-your-web-app-make-money/

If you want to pseudo-replicate this effect using css only, here are some examples and tutorials: http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-to-recreate-silverback… http://css-tricks.com/3d-parralax-background-effect/ The effect is only visible when someone resizes the browser window, but it's kind of neat nonetheless.