Lesson 1. Sales and Marketing. So true. I think every entrepreneur greatly underestimates sales and renvenue growth. It's easy to create "top-down" market share spreadsheets and imagine the opportunities. It just never works that way. I am starting to learn that Sales is a major part of any company. People tend to think that just because there are fewer and fewer brick and mortar stores, and face to face meetings for that matter, that sales isn't an integral a part of a company.
Lesson 2. Indeed money is important. But at the same time how necessary is it for a lot of what Silicon Valley is producing these days. Hardware and development tools are the cheapest they have ever been. You certainly don't need a ton of venture backing to create a web service. That is the approach I am taking.
Lesson 3. With my web service I never created spreadsheets with forecasted user growth. But at the same time can say growth never really took off the way I had hoped. More important to me is year over year growth.
Lesson 4. I am still running this as a sole founder... Anyone out there interested in sales/marketing?
Lesson 5. Great point. Always a difficult decision knowing what features to add. More and more I add features and have the requesting customer at least partially fund the development of it. And more often than not don't release them as a "public" features. Sometimes you have to resort to "consultingware" until your fully self-serve web serivce takes off on its own.
Lesson 6. Indeed. Never be afraid to reach out to people who sign up for your service and ask them more. Stackoverflow is a great site to "find peoples pain".
Lesson 7. Yes - you always have to keep your chin up, especially on days where you feel
It would be interesting if Ross could share some indicators on his revenue. If not, other metrics like how long it took to get the first sale, etc.
I am trying to submit my site to DMOZ. After following all the instructions on https://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html I click the "suggest URL" link on the main page. Low and behold, it returns me back to the page I started on.Surely I must be missing something.... Or is DMOZ more or less dead and no longer taking new sites?
I have been a Yahoo paid email customer for 15 years. One of the advantages was being able to read emails without being bombarded with Ads. Recently the Yahoo "experience" has changed, with the first entry always an "Ad" appearing to be an un-read email. And some of the right hand side has been dedicated for other banner ads.Others seeing this? Or has it been a slow "roll out"?
I just received this email from Dropbox. I have the free version, but only using 84.9 MB of 2 GB available. Email also included link back to Dropbox to upgrade to paid plans.Is this a new method to get people to upgrade to paid plans?