dshipper

Thanks for the comment! Obviously 3 instances were too much. But the point remains that if you're running a low traffic Rails app it's a lot cheaper (free) to host on Heroku than it is on EC2. And if you're running at the scale that DomainPolish was that makes all the difference in terms of take home profit.

Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people.

$3,500 might not be a lot to you. And obviously it's not enough to go away on. But it does mean that I can work full-time on my startup this summer.

I understand what you're saying and I think we actually agree on a few points. I'm not saying that bootstrappers can target a market and not make money for two years. In fact it's the opposite. It seems that that's the kind of idea that's suited for VC if you can get traction in other ways (signups, engagement etc).

To me, the kind of concept that's best fitted for bootstrapping is one that you can build in a few days and make money with right away like a project I did recently called DomainPolish.

I guess I should have been more careful about choosing the figures I cited, but I really didn't mean $50 million vs a billion as hard numbers. I was trying to say that as a bootstrapper you can target a smaller market or a smaller problem. That's something that you can't do as a venture funded business.

That means that all of the people who get funded early on who might ordinarily target your small problem are off building businesses targeted at HUGE markets. This means less competition for the bootstrapper and a greater chance to capitalize on the market opportunity.

I definitely realize how hard it is to do this stuff and I didn't want to make it seem like it's super easy to build a $50 million business. I'd love to actually some time man you seem like you have a good amount of experience with this stuff. I couldn't find your email but mine is dshipper@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you.

Hey shingen, saying that I didn't want to build a billion dollar company and instead want to build a $50 million dollar one is more of a tongue in cheek way of saying that as a bootstrapper I can pursue opportunities with a smaller addressable market.

Sorry if I came off as young and inexperienced, I am actually 20. I'd love to know if you still think what I'm saying doesn't hold water and more about why. Thanks for the comment

Exactly. And it's not just that there are nice size opportunities left, it's that it's easier to succeed as a bootstrapper with a lot of people funded because there's less competition in the spaces that bootstrappers generally play in.

Great quote! Most of my experience centers around developing small web/mobile apps where building ten new apps a year is pretty commonplace.

I'll add games to enterprise software as the two places where you'll have the most longevity for your code.

I really like this. It shifts the importance of the production from the physical e.g. the actual code, the actual book to the idea. Great comment.

Hahaha I think universities will still be teaching Java too :)

It's really hard to tell what the product actually does from just that one screenshot. I tried to sign up but it said my username was taken (even though I've definitely never signed up before). Looks like an interesting product if I could see what it does specifically.

Perhaps the site in question only allows US visitors ;). But good point! I guess there's always the danger of over-constraining possible inputs, but the general principle still holds that more guidance is better than less, and the more you can give that guidance without resorting to text the better.

Thanks! I loved that book when I read it a few months ago. One of the best examples they give of this concept is a VCR. There's only one way to put a tape into a VCR, and it isn't done with instructions or symbols, it's done using affordance or physical constraints. It doesn't fit any way but the right way.

I'd like to respectfully disagree. I think it's akin to saying "web browsers are not for running applications; that's what operating systems are for" 10 years ago. Email has a huge amount of potential to be used as a medium beyond just plain-text and I think that's a trend that we'll start to see manifesting itself more significantly over the next few years.

will do, thanks for the recommendation!

Thanks I'm glad you found it useful!

Oh wow thanks for the heads up. I wonder how that could have happened - we just launched the site today.

I'll definitely look into it. Is it possible that a previous owner of the domain used it for malware?

Thanks for the comment! I agree to some extent but using HTML doesn't necessarily mean a gaudy signature. For example your two line signature could be reduced to one line by linking your name to www.kswizz.com.

I don't think that we should limit use of a technology because it could be used to create something ugly (almost all technology can be used that way) but instead look at what kind of beautiful things it can make.

Ok I definitely agree that we should change the Download Now button to something else if it's misleading. Thanks for the feedback!

That's exactly what I meant by longtail leads. Thanks for the advice, I'm going to spend some time tonight going over keywords to optimize it as much as possible.

We're definitely looking to make this into a case-study for inbound marketing if possible, so hopefully in a month or two we'll have some reportable results. Thanks again for the feedback

Fair enough :). Are you saying that in general you don't give your email out, or are you saying you think the value prop for this particular app is too weak to give an email out for?

Hey everyone. We built this in a day yesterday by repurposing code from our current startup (Airtime for Email). We're hoping that people find it useful, and that eventually it will be able to help us generate qualified longtail leads from the SEO. We're really new to selling B2B and inbound marketing and I'd love your feedback :)

Excellent point. Added to our todo list :)

Thanks for the heads up we'll check it out!

Great points all. About Us section is coming ASAP. Agree on the SOPA banners as well. Thanks for taking the time to let us know.

Thanks for the feedback! It's impossible for us to tell what percentage of the total number of emails sent the 110,000 impressions represents because our server only gets hit when images are loaded. If images aren't loaded our server is never hit, and it's as if the email was never sent.

The total CTR across all 110,000 impressions was 0.42%, however we log an impression both when an email is being composed and when it is read on the other end. So if we discount the false positives for composing impressions then the CTR jumps to around 0.91% which is incredibly high given that the banners are not at all optimized.

We're working on better analytics to be able to separate legitimate impressions from composing impressions, but don't quite have that functionality yet.

Thanks again for commenting I really appreciate it!

Thanks so much! It's mostly done by hand but the buttons are from Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com/

Good point. We tried doing something where if the same email thread was loading multiple banners we would only serve one - but good email services like GMail load an image once and then display it multiple times throughout the thread thus defeating our anti-annoyance measures :)

Any company with employees that send out a lot of email every day. So for example if you have a big sales team, the marketing department doesn't have to tell them "Ok this week we want to talk more about widgetX" instead all they have to do is upload one banner and instantly every email that the sales team sends out has a banner a banner talking about the widgetX".

It's also great for charities, schools and political campaigns to raise money.

It's just an image in the bottom of the email. Many clients do avoid tracking but many don't. For example on an iPhone all images are loaded by default. Additionally a lot of people press "Display Images Below".

Initially I thought that images being blocked would be the biggest hurdle to this project, but it was being used prelaunch by 20 customers and we served over 110,000 impressions during that time (an impression isn't recorded if the image is blocked).

Wow I'd love to look at that project. The one problem is that we don't always have access to the actual HTML of the emails being sent out.

For example, you can integrate Airtime with GMail but Gmail doesn't actually allow you to play with HTML tags. You have to do it by inserting an image and then linking the image by hand. Effectively it's the same result, but it really limits our options in terms of styling etc.

You can definitely use this with WiseStamp although that's not the recommended path to integration :)