jazer

Herman Miller's Mirra chair is more affordable than the Aeron. I have been sitting on one every day for almost four years and I am very happy with it.

The main advantage of the Aeron is that it is much more adjustable than most chairs. You can really adjust it to fit your body.

Of course, it's not for everyone, but it's flexible enough to fit most people very well.

Exactly right, maxwell. Charging certain customers more, just because of who they are, is not a great business strategy :)

As so many others have said: yes, good people are expensive. And if you expect to grow to a non-trivial size, hosting/servers/bandwidth are going to cost you.

There is also the issue of leverage. If you need $500k, you don't raise $500k, because when you run out and start looking for more money, your negotiating position is very poor. Instead you raise $2M, then start to talk to investors again when you have spent half of it.

In my experience marketing is not a significant portion of expenses for a startup.

I email myself the moment I think of something, then process my email inbox once a day. When processing, I either do the thing (if it will take less than two minutes), or file it with a project or under someday/maybe. For filing, I just have a bunch of folders and files on my hard drive. Nothing fancy.