the_bear

I've picked my fair share of colors for various businesses, and something that annoys me is that you pretty much always end up with green or blue being the main color.

I tried to figure out why, and I think it's a really dumb reason: like this article says, if you don't really know what you're doing with design, you want a spectrum of light-to-dark colors to choose from. Light green -> normal green -> dark green.

For some weird reason, we call light red "pink". And dark orange/yellow is "brown". If you pick one of those as your main color, it becomes much harder to just use lighter or darker shades without it becoming something else entirely. Great designers can make pink or brown work, but if you're a programmer who's just trying to find a "good enough" color scheme, it's way easier to go with green or blue.

I don't really have a good reason why we all think of pink as a different color from red, but we do.

I love it, but that's sort of because it's not a real tech scene. I was in SF for five years before moving back to STL and while I love the city, the tech culture kind of wore on me. Things are a bit less like an echo chamber here I think.

St. Louis has a tech community, but it's pretty small, and there aren't very many people who have already experienced success. As a result, while there are a lot of the normal startup things like co-working spaces, networking events, etc., it isn't a particularly big part of life unless you really want it to be. It's easy to meet people who work in other industries, and I think people generally don't link their personal identity to their employer as much. I also think more people find satisfaction in non-tech work (like customer service, teaching, etc.). I consider this to be a more healthy and hopefully sustainable environment.

Having said that, it's a bit funny because many people in the tech scene here haven't experienced the Bay Area and they think STL is sort of "the next silicon valley" which is just so hilariously not true. I view that as a good thing because I left SF for a reason, but I do wish people would stop pretending that it's a first-class tech hub. It's just a great mid-sized city with roughly the same number of tech jobs as any other mid-sized city.

That's part of it, yes. The other part is that we pay engineers roughly market rate for our area, but we pay support significantly above that. Our philosophy is basically that everyone who works here should make a good living regardless of what their job is, so we're going to pay everyone that baseline. Certain employees (like engineers) might make more because the market demands it.

To be more specific, we start our support people at $53k/year and guarantee $10k/year raises for their first five years. We start engineers at $71k and guarantee the same $10k raises. So engineers are definitely making more, but in terms of the fully loaded costs to us, they're not that different.

Yes, I think $1MM is enough to pay 7 people, although it depends a lot on the specifics.

My business makes $2.2MM ARR and has 17 employees (counting the founders). We're profitable, although we try to put about as much money as we can afford back into growth, so we're right around break even. There are a number of factors to consider when thinking about whether this is "enough" money.

Location - We're based in St. Louis which has significantly lower cost of living than, say, the Bay Area (we moved from SF for this reason). St. Louis is much more expensive than some other parts of the world. So the amount of revenue a company "needs" is highly dependent on where it's located.

Types of employees - More than half of our employees are on the support team, and almost every came in as an entry level employee right out of college. We pay our support people very well (almost as much as the engineers) but it's definitely cheaper to employ a handful of entry-level support people vs. senior engineers. I think it's a common mistake to think that every startup is made up entirely of engineers.

Revenue per employee - Right now we're at about $130k ARR per employee, and like I mentioned, that's close to break even. If we keep growing somewhat quickly, we'll bring in enough new entry-level employees at lower salaries to bring the average down. But as our growth slows (which is happening, and happens to everyone eventually), our team becomes more and more senior and so we pay them accordingly. For this reason, I think we'll need to shoot for a higher $/employee. But not much higher I don't think. I bet $200k/employee would cover us long-term.

"Maximizing shareholder value" - One of the things that drives most tech companies to make so much money is that their primary goal (regardless of what their mission statement says) is to maximize shareholder value. When you're bootstrapped, you can choose not to do that. I work full-time as a founder/CEO and get paid well (probably about what I'd be making working for someone else, maybe a bit less). If I wanted to become a billionaire, then yeah, this business model wouldn't work. But that doesn't have to be the goal.

There are some calculators that help you figure this out. Here's one I just found with a Google search: https://www.optimizely.com/sample-size-calculator/

The idea is that to get results, you need some combination of a lot of data, or a big impact from the changes your testing. If you just change the color of the signup button, it probably won't have a major impact on the conversion rate, so you'll need a lot more data to reach a conclusion. But if you test a completely new landing page, it might have a better chance of being meaningfully different (better or worse, who knows until you test?) and so you wouldn't need as many visitors to get a result.

My company is about the same size as yours, although we hire a lot of interns each summer so we've probably onboarded ~40-50 people. Here are some things I'd suggest:

First off, I'd suggest that you change your stance on whether or not they should be productive on day 1 and whether or not they should be a time suck for the CEO. At a 20 person company, if the CEO isn't personally owning hiring, culture, and onboarding, then they're not doing their job. New employees are super expensive, and it's a no-brainer to invest an extra week or two of work to help set up long-term success. I'd suggest optimizing for how productive they are at ~3 months rather than on day one.

For us, the first ~week is pretty much full-time onboarding. That doesn't mean they're always doing stuff (no one can absorb that much information) but it means we have a pretty defined schedule for that first week. It's a mix of the following:

- General company onboarding: this is mostly me and one of the other leaders at the company telling our story, explaining our industry, talking about how most startups work and then contrasting that against how we work. Going over the employee handbook with everyone, etc. We've found that any more than an hour per day of this type of thing turns new hires into zombies, but if you spread it out (normally 4-5 hours over the first week) they find it really valuable.

- Job-specific training: For developers this means getting them into the code base (we normally do a lot of pair programming the first week or two until they're up to speed). For support it means learning the product, answering sample contact forms, etc. This takes up the majority of their time.

- Getting to know the team: we schedule several activities to give new hires a chance to meet each other (if more than one person starts around the same time) and the rest of the team. Their peer mentor takes them out for coffee. They play board games or darts with various members of the team just to get a chance to chat. We have company-provided lunch once per week, send them on a scavenger hunt so they get to know the area around our office, etc.

- Brain breaks: starting a new job can be really stressful, and most people are too nervous to admit that they're exhausted and aren't really retaining new information anymore. I'd suggest building in at least one 30-minute block each morning and each afternoon (maybe even more than that) for them to just go off on their own and read a book, mess around online, etc.

It took us a few years to refine this, and I'm sure your approach will be different. But I guess my main piece of advice is to just give up on the hope that this won't be disruptive. Whoever is primarily responsible for onboarding (ideally the CEO at first, or the new hire's direct manager once the process is worked out) should just cross off the first week on their calendar. Even if you don't know what you're doing, you can overcome almost all possible problems by just putting in face time and actually giving a shit about the person you just hired.

I think it's better for 10 different companies to each have 1/10th of your data rather than one company having all of it. Facebook has grown to the point where they're just too big. They have pretty much every person I've ever known as a user. Those users have the app (or multiple apps) installed on their phones, upload all their photos, do much of their messaging, plan their events, etc. within Facebook. Plus Facebook owns a bunch of other properties with huge user bases.

The potential for abuse is smaller if we use independent services for all of those different things, even if those services aren't any more trustworthy than Facebook.

Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion rate. I think it's possible we're above average, but we're not doing 10x better than "extremely good" peers.

Maybe there's just so much variance that it's impossible to give a good benchmark, but even still, 2% seems low.

I also suspect that marketing has a lot to do with it. A company that's much better at marketing than product will be better at getting someone to sign up for a trial and worse at converting them, so maybe their numbers would be down in the 2% range. I feel like I'm the opposite (bad at marketing, but pretty good at product)

I hire for a small startup, so maybe this isn't how it works at the big companies, but I certainly wouldn't dock points for this. I think it shows initiative, and at worst I wouldn't care one way or the other.

The only way I could imagine it being a red flag is that sometimes people put things on their resumes that aren't real accomplishments (like things they did in high school, or the fact that they know how to use MS Word) and it makes me wonder if there are so few worthwhile things for them to talk about that they use filler like that. But even then I pretty much just ignore it.

Do you have to target enterprise customers rather than small businesses? Enterprises have very complicated decision-making processes that can be hard to navigate if you're not experienced, and even harder if you don't already have traction.

Small businesses on the other hand will normally try out a demo of the product and decide on the spot if they like it or not. They aren't all that way, but if you talk to 50 10-person businesses, at least a couple of them will probably be willing to buy on the spot if your product solves a problem for them at a reasonable price.

Go get some of those tiny customers even if they're not profitable for you, and then later move upmarket to the enterprise clients you really want. Or do what I do and just stay focused on small customers indefinitely because they're so much better to work with.

We just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a laptop, but a full workstation wherever you decide to sit down.

In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same docking station setup.

I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone. Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.

Makes sense. I was worried that something like a beanbag would get gross over time, but I'm probably overthinking it. We already have a couple in non-quiet areas and they're fine. Thanks for the response!

I'm interested in making it easier for people to nap at my company, but I'm having some trouble figuring out the logistics. I don't mind people taking naps, but I don't want to end up dealing with cleaning sheets, blankets, etc.

Any suggestions on how a small office (~15 people) can have a napping area without taking on any additional custodial work?

One interesting challenge with this real-time vs. async communication challenge is that different job roles have different needs. At my company, most of our employees have been on the customer service side until recently, and Slack is great for them. Almost everything they need to talk about is urgent (even if it's not important) and temporary. They rarely have long-lasting high-level conversations.

Now we're starting to hire more developers and I'm realizing how disruptive it is for them to be pulled into Slack conversations all the time. So I've started using email more for communicating with the devs, and that seems to work reasonably well.

The questions I have are: (a) is it possible to have a single communication tool that handles both real-time and async properly and (b) does that even matter? Maybe email+Slack is a perfectly fine solution. Either way, it's obvious that only using Slack isn't a viable option.

Disclaimer: I run my own CRM company, so you can either view this comment as genuine praise/advice, or an attempt to subvert a competitor (but I promise it's the former).

First off, this looks awesome. I've heard people complain many times about how they just want a personal CRM for non-business purposes. On the one hand I love the idea because having such a specific use case allows you to make a very simple UI that does exactly what the user needs. On the other hand, I never personally chose to go after it because getting individual consumers to pay for stuff seems hard.

So I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you stick with it. The "Why Monica?" section of your website sounds like it was written specifically for me, and I'm definitely going to try it out because of that copy.

My main piece of advice: be skeptical of most product suggestions. As someone who has been building a simple CRM for the past ~8 years, I can tell you that everyone wants something different, and if you react to every suggestion you get, your product will end up losing the awesome focus it has right now. That doesn't mean you should ignore feedback, it just means you should make sure the feedback is coming from your actual target audience and not some random person who's looking for Monica to be something it isn't. I fell for that too many times in the early days.

My email is in my profile if you ever want to talk shop.

This seems really aggressive, especially for bootstrapped companies. My startup took 31 months to hit $10k MRR, and now we're at ~$130k MRR. I'm really glad I didn't quit after three months. I barely even had the product built after three months.

I think that for most people, if they abandon anything that's not already a huge success three months in, they'll just end up bouncing from one thing to the next and never seeing anything through. It's virtually impossible to bootstrap that quickly, and I'd be surprised if many of the big VC-backed startups we've heard of hit that either (certainly not Google or Facebook who weren't even monetizing yet at that point).

I personally have experienced two problems with experienced people in the early days:

1) The last company I worked at started out with an experienced founder/CEO and a few entry-level people (including me). The company was in the heavily-regulated and very conservative health benefits space, and we were attempting to do something pretty radical. Things were going great.

After raising the series A, they brought in a bunch of executives who had been very successful working at more traditional healthcare companies. Those people immediately started executing the playbook they already knew which meant our startup went from being agile and disruptive to basically being a smaller version of all the existing companies in the industry. It didn't go well.

2) After that, I co-founded my own company. We're bootstrapped so it took a while before we could hire people, but when we did start hiring, there was a big difference between the entry-level people vs. the more experienced people we hired. This is almost entirely my fault, but here's what happened: I knew the entry-level people would need guidance and mentorship, so I invested heavily in onboarding them, making sure they understand the mission, and so on. With the experienced people (who I already knew well) I trusted them to know what needed to be done and do it, so I didn't spend nearly as much time trying to align them with the goals of the company. Big shock: that didn't work out very well for some of those experienced hires.

Once again, this is my fault, not necessarily a problem with hiring experienced people in general, but it doesn't change the fact that our entry-level hires have all worked out great while the experienced hires were much more hit-or-miss.

I have no idea if that's what sama is talking about, but I definitely nodded my head a bit when I read his advice.

I ran into this recently myself. I've been doing web development my whole career, but I never got into the complicated toolchain side of it. I just used a vanilla html/javascript setup and I would build out my own tools or manually include existing libraries as I needed them (no webpack, etc.)

Then it came time to learn React and pretty much every tutorial out there requires a twisted combination of npm, webpack, babel, etc. just to get a simple page running. I just about gave up.

Then I realized that you can run React without any of that stuff by just copying the first section of sample code from this page: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html

So I started with that and built out my own simple framework. As I became more familiar with React and how it interacted with my own homemade framework, I was able to understand where all of the other pieces fit in, and gradually I've been including some third party tools that previously seemed insanely complicated to me (note: the toolchains still seem needlessly complicated, but at least I can generally get things to work now).

Absolutely, I don't think that parental leave will impact someone's decision to have kids. However, giving a benefit to people who have kids without giving that same benefit to people without kids is not that different from the company saying that they want their employees to have kids. It won't actually change behavior, but it still stands out to me as a pretty opinionated stance from the employer about what behavior they want from their employees.

Parental leave is a good way to keep people with kids happy. Why shouldn't we also keep people without kids happy? Everyone deserves time to pursue passions outside of work. Some people are passionate about their families. Other people are passionate about other things. I think employers shouldn't have an opinion on which is more valid, and they should support both.

I've always viewed benefits like this as a way for the company to incentivize and/or reward certain behavior from employees. Offering a 401(k) match is a way to encourage employees to save for retirement.

By that logic, offering parental benefits is a way to encourage people to have babies. That's always seemed a bit weird to me because it seems inappropriate for a company to be involved in something so personal. It seems reasonable for the government to say, "we want more people to have kids for the greater good" but it seems strange for companies to take it upon themselves to do that.

I'm not saying new parents shouldn't be able to take time off, but it seems like people who choose not to have kids should receive similar benefits. Maybe companies should offer sabbaticals to everyone, and if some people choose to use that to take time off after having kids, then that's fine. But if someone isn't interested in having kids and instead wants to spend three months pursuing a hobby, that seems equally valid to me.

Thoughts?

I don't think that most companies are designing their offices entirely around sick days. It seems likely that you could find a number of areas where open offices look statistically better, and a number of areas where they look worse.

It also seems likely to me that open offices are more likely to be poorly executed than private rooms (there's a lot more rope to hang yourself with). That's all the more reason for us to have more nuanced discussions about it.

As an example, most people on HN are singularly focused on what makes for a good office for programmers. My startup is made up mostly of non-programmers, and all programmers are allowed to work remotely. So basically, my goals might not be the same as yours, and one-size-fits-all advice is too simplistic.

Another example: In our office everyone's primary desk is in the open workspace, but we also have enough private rooms that 100% of our team can work from those at the same time if they want. So no one has to work from the open office, and yet most people choose to. I'd guess that open offices are viewed much more favorably when they're not the only option.

I read a lot of hate for open offices on Hacker News, but I don't think it's as simple as "open offices are bad." Last year my startup moved into our first office and I did an informal survey of the team (who had previously been working from their respective homes) about whether they'd prefer their main desks to be in private offices or an open room, and the winner was the open office.

My point isn't that open offices are better. But some people clearly prefer them, and I think this community would benefit from a more nuanced discussion about when an open office is better vs. when private rooms are better.

This article takes a step in that direction by pointing out that some open layouts are better than others, but the author also makes it pretty clear that he never thinks an open office is a good thing. The world is rarely so black and white.

Almost all conversations about pricing make the same mistake: they assume that we all have the same goals. Your goal might be to squeeze as much money out of your customers as you can. That's totally fine, and completely ethical, but it's not my goal. I'm guessing many people are similar to me.

I want my business to be profitable. I want to get rich off of it. But I want my customers to get even richer. I want to know for a fact that I'm leaving money on the table for my customers to capture for themselves. I suspect that in the long run this will actually be a good business decision (happier customers now = more word of mouth) but even if it isn't, I still think it's the right decision for me. That's why I don't raise my prices.

Isn't the author comparing Google's approach to Apple's? Google has more market share than Apple in just about every software category, so if Google can iterate, than why can't Apple?

I think it has more to do with Apple's marketing. Every time they release even the most trivial improvement they tout it as being amazingly innovative. They also charge premium prices. This creates an expectation with their users that everything will be perfect from the beginning.

To be fair, one of the greatest "see the future" CEOs has said similar things. Just off the top of my head, I know that Steve Jobs said that no one would want a larger screen than the original iPhone had, and he said that 7" tablets didn't make any sense. Now Apple has a larger iPhone screen and 7" tablet.

That's not to say that Steve Jobs was wrong about the future, but he had to sell devices in the present which meant pretending that they were perfect even though they weren't. Ballmer may have been doing the same. It's likely that his failures occurred much earlier in the process, and then he had to try to sell doomed products which is where those silly statements come from.

Thanks for checking us out! There are two different options if you want to track campaigns. One would be just make a "Group" for each campaign, and then add the appropriate contacts to the group. Very soon we'll be adding the ability to filter the pipeline reports by groups, so that should give you what you're looking for.

Alternatively, you could add a custom field to a pipeline (pipelines = leads for most people) which would track the campaign. It could be a text field or a dropdown list depending on how many campaigns you're running.

As for the task management, it's not quite the same, but you can add a checkbox list to the lead pipeline to track which tasks you've completed. We also have more task functionality coming at some point, but not in the near future unfortunately.

Thanks for the feedback on the pricing. Our reservation with charging more for each feature is that while it's very fair, it seems kind of complicated to some people if they have to pick and choose every single feature they want to pay for. Many of our users love how easy it is to understand the price. What we were considering was offering two products: CRM, and "everything else". So you decide whether you want all the extra stuff (invoice, project management, etc.) or if you just want the CRM, and there are just two prices (probably $10 and $25). I like that model, but it seems a lot like having pricing plans which is why I'm not 100% sold on it yet.

Chrischen is right. Maybe I'm not using the term correctly, but I think of "plans" as meaning multiple different tiers that a user can choose from. Mailgun previously had plans (i.e. you had to pick which tier you wanted) and now they don't (i.e. there is just one tier that applies to everyone).

Some characteristics of plans that I don't like:

* Passing some arbitrary limit (# of contacts, # of users, # of files, etc) triggers a steep increase in price, rather than having the price gradually increase as usage increase. For Mailgun, usage is the number of emails sent. For us, it's the number of users on the account.

* Because of the steep price increases at arbitrary points, some users get a lot more value out of the software than others. With Highrise (another CRM) an account with 5,000 contacts pays $24, while an account with 5,001 users pays $49/month. Both accounts are getting roughly the same value, but one is paying twice as much as the other.

* Most SaaS companies with plans force users to choose which plan (or tier) they want when they sign up. How would a user know what features are worth paying for when they haven't even tried the software yet?

* Plans are often used to upsell existing customers after they're locked into your service. Salesforce has a plan that is cheaper than my company's price ($5/user/month vs. $10/user/month) but it is limited to the point of being almost useless. I've talked to many people who got suckered into a 1+ year commitment with them only to realize they'd have to pay $65-$250/user/month to get the functionality they needed.

* Customers have to monitor their usage to make sure they don't trigger the next tier. It's just one extra thing to worry about every day, and businesses have enough on their minds without worrying about unexpected price increases.

Having said all of that, I'm currently struggling with how I might go about offering more products than just a CRM without making it look like a tiered system. I don't consider it to be the same thing because they really will be additional products (project management, invoicing, etc.) which are generally completely separate subscriptions if you use a different company's products, but I want them to be integrated/bundled directly with the CRM to make the user experience as simple as possible. Still not quite sure how to pull this off. Pricing sure is tricky.

This is awesome. Aside from the fact that my bill will be cut in half, I hate plans. Plans are just one more thing to monitor (make sure you don't go over your totally arbitrary limit!), and they generally lead to weird inequity.

For example, I've been adding ~75 people per day to my MailChimp list and the price stayed the same. Then one day it went from $75 to $150. Adding thousands of subscribers was completely free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.

My dad is an accounting professor, and while I don't think he normally involves undergrads in his research, it seems like he could. This is just one small segment of business research, but he tests how rules and incentives impact decision making.

For example, make a game where two people are teamed up. You give person A $10 and tell them they can give as much as they want to person B, and that's it. How much does person A share? Ok, now what if you give instructions explaining to person A that person B leaves empty handed if they don't share? What if you say that they're supposed to share 50%? What if 10% of whatever is given to person B is lost as a "tax"? The idea is to figure out ways to get people to act honestly and fairly in the hopes that it can be applied to business.

Undergrads could help find test subjects. They could help design the tests (they generally involve simple software that administers the games). Some could probably analyze the results in the hopes of finding interesting and unexpected takeaways.

I would really love for someone knowledgeable to comment on this. I'd never even thought about blocking customers in Eastern Texas. I just compared a map of my users to a map of the texas districts (http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/images/divisions/texasdistrictm...) and I'm pretty sure that out of my 2000 paying users, not a single one falls in that district. It seems to just miss Houston and Dallas.

If blocking IPs that originate from that region would offer additional protection from patent trolls, I'd do it in a heart beat. I know that the real answer is "talk to a lawyer" which I will do, but it'd be interesting to see someone from the Hacker News community comment on the viability of this strategy.