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Comment by msy | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely looking forward to watching this but to me it also demonstrates something about startups and silicon valley - who you are and who you're friends with matters almost as much as what you do. There's no way in hell he'd be launching with that client list if he was some random guy, no matter how awesome the platform was. The network effect of having the right early users increasingly seems like the dirty secret of the startup game. See: posterous.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that, I'm not certainly suggesting there's anything unfair about it - people work on trust networks, it's entirely natural and utterly rational - but it does make it clear how important it is to network, get your name out there and build reputation.

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I agree (although I'm not in the valley).

It is unfair in the sense of "unfair advantage." Of course I'll exploit it -- I'd be stupid not to -- but it's unfair.

This is exactly why increasingly it's hard to do a startup without teaming up with someone with a reputation. Maybe this just proves that.

I think that many people are taking issue with the way you phrased your intro. Something like, "Hey, I'm launching a new startup, to prove to myself that I can do it again. Why don't you follow along because I'll be sharing each step of this journey on my blog!" may have been received better by the community. Nevertheless, the approach you took is a legitimate one. And of course, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of your notoriety as a means of propelling your new startup. You worked hard to get where you are, and fully deserve to take advantage of your position, connections, etc.

You can become Wordpress's Heroku if you play your cards right, and I don't see how you are not going to make big money out of this company as well. My only suggestion would be to reconsider your pricing, so as to make it more accessible (while also meeting the needs of those who don't quite require unlimited blogs). For example, you could charge $29 for a single blog, $49 for 3 blogs, $99 for "unlimited".

This is exactly why increasingly it's hard to do a startup without teaming up with someone with a reputation.

I'll be looking forward to seeing you mention this on your blog, perhaps even in the comments for the latest post.

Am I missing something? That client list isn't really that top notch(no offense intended). It's not like he is starting out with Techcrunch and Mashable as clients.

I haven't even heard about any of them besides balsamiq and his own asmartbear.

I'm sure if you hustled and offered those guys deep discounts you could get a few of them as clients too.

I'm not so sure. Assume you're at least a semi-serious blogger. Some person you don't know comes up to you and offers to take care of the blog that you already have and is already working, and charge you money for it. Are you sure you'd be interested, or that you'd trust him not to close shop in a month and leave you worse off?

why would you charge money of the first people you'd approach? The idea is to do give it to them for free and then you use their reputation to sell more of your own product.

Not if you are bootstrapping. That whole free forever thing has a way of backfiring (more often than not);

Plus, we offer EVERY customer 15 days free.

We've got quite a few clients who are currently not listed on our homepage (which we'll fix!) who are racking up some serious bandwidth and page view numbers (3TB - 5TB per month, 5+ million page views, etc). One of these IS listed on our homepage, NiceKicks.

They may not be "cool" but they are big and need to scale. We're in talks to add a few more "cool" startups soon as well.

Dude, that's a pretty cool looking photo you've got there.

+1 for the hat. :)

I'm glad my photo and hat gets us some extra points! Everything helps I suppose =)

To give credit where credit is due, my good friend Jay B Sauceda here in Austin took that photo (he's awesome): http://www.jaybsauceda.com/

And here's the photo DJN is talking about.

http://wpe.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/0...

I agree, nice photo.

We call him Oliver Twist. :)

I'm curious to hear what early users we got that may have helped us. OK, Arrington was a good one. =) Others?

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