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Re:Ask HN: What's a Non-Programmer to do? by patio11 on Saturday August 22, 2009 @12:43PM (#779482)
reply to them personally

Unless you are automating this (i.e. spamming), it isn't worth your time for their product. Do the math: how many people would you find per hour? How many would you contact, per hour? How many trial signups? How many convert to a paying plan? What is their ARPU? Of that, what is the margin?

I'm looking at their pricing table, and it suggests that a customer is likely to be worth less than $10 a month in profit to them, unless they are an institutional account.

Concentrate on stuff which scales out of proportion to time invested, or you're just buying yourself a low-skill low-value job.

Re:Ask HN: What's a Non-Programmer to do? by gsaines on Saturday August 22, 2009 @02:37PM (#779631)
This is a really valid concern. Right now it's really tempting to use my time inefficiently essentially building up unsustainable expectations from our user base. To be fair, I've given in many times, and I write personalized thank you cards to people who pay (we don't advertise that anywhere, so I can stop whenever it becomes unmanageable), but a lot of the things that I could be doing don't make a lot of sense when I run the numbers, which is frustrating. I see all these other businesses running huge adwords campaigns (we tried it, didn't get good ROI, we'll try again later, but not yet), hiring employees, moving into offices, managing payrolls, schmoozing with clients (something that's hard to do in rural Ohio) and generally doing things which the numbers say aren't a good use of my time.