That's great, I totally missed it on AngelList, my bad, glad you posted it.
I have never heard of or seen a growth pattern like that, it is strange. Maybe someone else can comment on it. Usually we see clients that have much more rocky patterns with the overall trend growing but it is up and down and of course has spike trends near events, press coverage etc. Our own growth has seen that same trend so that seems more normal to me, but hey, long as you are growing it is good.
On your website, it isn't horrid, but I just don't think it puts your best foot forward or gives you the first impression of a professional firm yet.
I am in the same position you are overall, solo founder with a wife, kids etc. That is part of what stopped me from taking some investment dollars earlier this year for my product business. We had been seeking out interested investors because we have some traction, but both groups that gave us offers (term sheets + details) were limiting me to such a small founder salary I couldn't support my family on it. Literally one of them was around a $50k salary, which I don't mean to scoff at, but just isn't realistic for this point in my life. We don't live the high life and have little debt/bills overall, but that is just too low for us. The catch is I couldn't be pissed at them because they are focused on making money, it just didn't work for us and they weren't willing to budge. So instead I changed the plan, pulled back some and am regrouping to pull more consulting income again. And I will just bootstrap more until either I make it, the product fails, I fail or I decide to try and raise again. The only part that really sucked to me was that sadly rejecting those offers meant I had to change my team up for that product because I just couldn't support them full time without enough revenue or investment.
Good luck, my email is in my profile if you want to chat offline any.
The growth pattern is weird -- in kind of a good way -- and is definitely real as confirmed by admin panel signups, paid conversions, etc. mirroring and confirming it. Those are also pretty solid stable percentages of the overall count.
Web visits follow a much more rocky pattern but if you smooth out the noise you get a rough echo of the 1.4% connected devices growth rate for recurring visits, which make sense and further confirms its reality.
I've just never seen a growth rate so consistent and deterministic. You can hold the edge of a piece of paper under a log(Y) scale graph of "devices online" and the line is straight. Apparently in ten years I will have a device online for every atom in the solar system. /lulz
Granted I've been focusing on bug fixes, software improvements, and working with select customers, so I haven't done much to update the web site or optimize for viral growth. This is very much a "hands off" organic rate. It'll be interesting to see how it responds if I do change things up a bit. The smoothness of it will make any kind of A/B testing a breeze... any change should jump right out and smack me in the face. :)
#4 is really food for thought. I mean really. My gut instinct would be to agree with you wholeheartedly. Maybe PR is an area where "business advice" has wormed its way into my brain. Try as I might, I just can't ignore enough "business advice." :)
If I cut that PR component the required raise drops substantially... at least in half.
So far all my growth and conversion has been from viral, social, direct person-to-person, and other "organic" means, but I've also observed that blogs and press mentions drive traffic and prime the pump. My graphs look like this: a remarkably consistent exponential (straight line on log plot) 1.4% daily compounded growth, but every major press or blog hit just elevates the graph vertically a few ticks where it then continues its 1.4% march. The 1.4% number is so incredibly constant it's spooky... I've never seen anything like it. It just continues no matter what I do, for months and months. This is for active online users, which is the best metric for this system. Is a constant growth rate like that common? I always assumed growth rates would look "rocky" like most other real-world data.
#5 is interesting too. It looks a lot better than it used to, but perhaps that isn't saying much. I might just use a professional web design hosted software suite like Squarespace or The Grid, since I've got better things to do than dink around with HTML/CSS minutia.
It is up on AngelList: https://angel.co/zerotier-networks
As far as salary goes you're right. I have a family and kids, so I can't afford a really big pay cut. That's another downside of not being a bachelor right out of college, and is a big part of why the startup scene is so biased toward early-twenty-somethings. But hey, I guess part of doing stuff like this is that you have to deal with what you have as intelligently as you can. You can't change your circumstances in these areas but you can hack around them.