On pivoting: how we're trying to deal with the unintended use of our product

Throttle requests (maybe at the IP level) for the prototypes, but resell hosting. Redirect your third-level domains transparently for the hosted sites - make it dead easy, just a matter of clicking a box to "add public hosting". Then keep the prototype there as the testbed for new development, with a button to "Click to publish".

That will take you, what, a whole day to set up? It's a no-brainer.

Funny, with http://www.webpop.com we've kinda run into the opposite dilemma.

We're building a fully hosted CMS, with redundant, load balanced hosting, custom data types, generic non-branded client interface and so on.

But during our beta period we've discovered that it's also just about the easiest way we know to get a quick prototype or experiment online.

Now while deciding on our pricing, we get into a dilemma. If we go with the typical per project pricing model of most other hosted CMSs, aimed at agencies, we wouldn't really make it viable to use Webpop for quick experiments, prototypes or mostly static pages.

So now we're pondering if we can come up with a set of plans that supports both ways of using Webpop...

Hey Guys,

Interesting article - just tweeted it. While i wouldnt say i am part of the "lean startup cult" - i must say i really like their stance on Pivoting.

The Flickr example is a great one, smart companies, the truly smart ones you find always had to pivot a few times. It has certainly happened at the company i work for (Grasshopper).

We used to be called GotVMail - we realized that being voicemail focused wasnt the right strategy, and that really we were a communications solution for entrepreneurs. We bit the bullet, as pivoting is always taking one step back to go forward. But its been amazing for our business ever since.

Good luck!

This was a great post. Situations like this are a big challenge for any startup: on the one hand it's a huge opportunity, on the other hand you want to stay focus, and on the third hand you want to listen to your customers ... I really like the way they're approaching it with an open mind, working with Q42 and asking broadly for feedback.

And it's an intriguing tool, too. One of the other impressive things about this post was how well they spotlighted their customer Q42 and their customers' client bransomcompany while also showing off their own product to good advantage. I signed up, and I bet I'm not the only one :-)

Interesting product... Time to run with new features and new uses. I'd love to be in the position of having users figure out new uses for a product of mine. What better way to have user-guided product development?

quplo: Your workflow for managing projects is quite excellent, signed up to try it out!

plug: You all would probably also be interested in my Visual CSS3 Animation Designer, available for prototype preview @ http://editroom.splatcollision.com/

*It's hosted on a single dyno (free) heroku plan, so forgive any slow load times...

This is how not to write a product plug in a disguise of insightful blog post. Way way too much marketing content, no concise summary at the top of what happened and too long in general. Feels forced and disingenuous :|

There's obviously a market for hosted services, from barebones shared hosting services like GoDaddy to VPS hosting like Linode and dedicated hosting.

There's also a market for specialized hosting like point-and click design with Squarespace and Ruby on Rails hosting with Heroku (which recently sold for >$200 million to Salesforce I might add).

My advice? Run with the idea. The barrier to entry is stupendously low. Resell a VPS or even EC2 or even get your own dedicated server. If it doesn't work out, no loss. If it does, it's relatively easy to scale up to more cost effective solutions.

You may want to make your preview sites not usable as free hosting however. Throttling requests, putting a banner at the top, limiting requests, something like that.

This is a VERY clever way to get people like me interested in finding out what Quplo does given that I have no idea what Quplo is.