Building the Perfect Bootstrapped Business on WordPress. Inspiring talk on so many levels. Where to find recurring value: business cycles; ongoing, value-generating costs; highly dynamic environments.
If you like my WordPress work, check out my new plugin, Bylines. Thanks!
Building the Perfect Bootstrapped Business on WordPress. Inspiring talk on so many levels. Where to find recurring value: business cycles; ongoing, value-generating costs; highly dynamic environments.
And our users clearly thought of us as an open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee (which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all).
This wasn’t because the product was so good people didn’t need to pay for support, or because developers don’t control budgets, or because of failure of capitalism. The answer is basic microeconomics. Developers love building developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply vastly outstrips it. This drives the number of alternatives up, and the prices down to zero.
Slava Akhmechet – RethinkDB: why we failed
The joy-less world of data-driven startups. Bookmarking this for every time I have a conversation about a crappy design performing "better."
Startup equity benefits your boss, not you. Why you should be extremely cautious about VC-fueled rocket ships.
Essays from Peter Thiel’s Stanford class on startups. In a nutshell, freely available material like this is why I am a college dropout. Every essay is worth reading — queue up your Pocket. I particularly appreciated this one on markets, competition, and monopolies. (via Spittle)
How I failed: Six lessons learned. Wonderful set of insights from Tim O’Reilly. Number four is a very hard problem to solve.
The Anti-Dropout. Two pieces: the technical problems of the next decade won’t be solved with knowledge that can be self-taught, and the next generation of innovation will come from large organizations where credentials matter.
Today I’m hanging out at Tiny Startup Camp, an uniquely Portland event. If Portland is the place young people go to retire, this is how they get paid. Jason Glaspey of Paleo Plan, and formerly Bacn, is kicking things off.
Doubling SaaS Revenue By Changing The Pricing Model. “Most customers do not care about price… those that do are disproportionately terrible customers.”
https://vimeo.com/46661516
One startup in this class at PIE is KS12. As a creative studio, they’re breaking the mold of what you typically might see at a tech incubator. Plus, they’re powered by WordPress. Pretty neat.