theflyingkiwi42

As a potential user, I'd like that.

A monthly subscription is just another thing I need to manage. Also, I feel like I am paying for a time where I may not be using it yet (there's a time delay between setting it up and actually going out to investors).

And the jump from $89 to $199 just for a CNAME is a little high as well.

How did (potential) investors like this? We're just starting our fundraising process. This looks interesting but I am afraid it adds friction for the investor who may not want to be tracked, nor does it make it easy for them to share it with others.

Regarding the pricing, it seems reasonable once you are going for Series A, but when you are still counting every penny, it is a bit steep (especially without a money back guarantee).

My main issue with Balanced is that since I don't use them to collect payments, it takes forever to get the money moved to them. And it is a manual process.

So every Monday morning I get a file with payments. I have to move that amount over to Balanced. This can take 3 to 5 business days, but almost always takes 5 or even 6. Meaning I cannot pay my customers until the Friday (5 days) or the Monday (8 days) later.

Also, Balanced cannot process ACH for payments from clients. Having to verify an account with micro deposits is simply not workable for our clientele, many of which do not want to take credit cards because of the high fees.

While our volume right now is too low, it is interesting info to have, and something I'll look into further.

Thanks!

Just curious. How hard is it for a bank to agree to be your “Originating Depository Financial Institution"? We currently use Balanced for ACH payouts, but it sounds like we could actually do this ourselves and significantly speed up the process as well as cut down on fees.

There's a big difference between being a developer and being somebody with a CS degree. In my experience with hiring developers, I always value people being self-taught. This means you made things work!

To me, that's the difference between a developer and a programmer. A programmer might write technically better code, but often gets stuck when something does not work as intended as is often the case in web browsers. A developer will find a way to make it work, and make it work well for the user.

So don't sell yourself short and keep on learning. You may in fact be more desirable than somebody with a CS degree.

Simplystudio.com

We're looking for a full-time remote (US/Canada only) senior front-end/UI developer.

Currently our system is an all-in-one business management SaaS for photographers and we're ready to start expanding into other markets especially freelancers and other event related industries (videographers, wedding planners, etc).

You would be responsible for tying the HTML/CSS done by our in house designer to our back-end API (done in Perl). You need to possess very strong Javascript, CSS and HTML skills, and be comfortable with remote work. Our team is all over the US and Canada. We do meet in person 3 times in a year, usually around the L.A. area.

Our front-end is done through an in-house developed MVC, that relies heavily on Knockout.js and jquery. Experience with knockout would be preferred. You also need to have experience with REST and JSON, and be comfortable with using server side APIs.

We're looking for a great UI developer. Somebody who can make it work, rather than worries too much about the code being perfect from a programming POV. Somebody who can understand how it needs to be used by the end user and will work with our UX designer to make things as easy as possible.

We're a small team, so it is important that you are self-reliant and can take the initiative to make things better for our users.

If you are interested, please drop me a line at jobs@simplystudio.com.

You can also not fund stripe to do ACH payments. So if you have your own merchant account with much lower rates, you cannot use Stripe to pay out.

You can with Balanced, which is awesome (in theory).

I really want to like Balanced, and we signed up a few weeks ago. Before signing up, I contacted them on the IRC channel and asked if there were any other requirements to get started and send out payments. We would be sending out approximately $160k on our first batch that we'd have to fund through a bank and I wanted to make sure there would be no delays.

I was assured that this would be fine, and no additional information would be required. Well, reality turned out to be different. After sending the funding requests from our bank account, nothing happened for a few days. I didn't want to be impatient annoying customer so I waited till day 3 and shot them an email.

Turned out the transactions were flagged by their risk management team, and that they just made a mistake by not contacting us. They did process the withdrawals that day, and while the funds have now left the bank account, our Balanced account is still not funded and we can still not send out the payments.

My customers were expecting to be paid by today. Now, due to the bank holiday, if I am lucky, they will be paid by Wednesday. These are people's mortgage and rent payments. Completely unacceptable.

Balanced did apologize but did not attempt in any way to speed up the payment process. I even offered to wire the funds as it was essential that things would go through on time.

I completely understand that there is risk management involved, which is why I contacted them to begin with. I also understand that mistakes can be made, and I'll cut them slack for that. But the fact is that I now have 100s of very pissed off customers (understandably so) and that I think Balanced could have made more of an effort to help getting this batch out on time.

Hopefully this was just a glitch and the rest will go smoothly. Like I said, I want to like them but if you are like us and are already somewhat established, make sure you are not on a tight deadline and pro-actively follow-up.

We call the next day. I'll see what happens if we call within an hour. Good suggestion - thanks!

We call every sign-up, but only about 5% answers the call. While we leave a nice voicemail message, and offer a free setup session, very few users take us up on it. Almost none of the people that we leave a voicemail with call us back.

Are there are metrics available for companies that do this? So far I have not seen any increase in LTV from the people that we do reach.

I want to add that we religiously use a format outlined here (also mentioned in the Constant Contact video):

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/

Patrick, thank you for the Gail Goodman link. That was priceless.

I've launched a few different businesses, two SaaS business and one software product.

In all three cases people bought it on day one or the first day after the trial expired. The first SaaS business I just posted on a few forums to come check us out. I was shocked when people purchased a yearly plan when we were still very much in beta.

However, it took two years before it started taking off, and then it suddenly did take off due to word of mouth. That was great, but also a double edged sword. Once better funded competitors arrived in the market, word of mouth went to them, and our sign-ups started to drop off.

To counter it, we did competitive upgrades. That was really our most successful campaign though it only worked online. We did advertise it in magazines but few people every signed up because of it.

With my latest SaaS, we had access to a huge opt-in email list. Lots of sign-ups on day one, and quite a few converted to paying customers once the trial ended. That said, having now done that for a year, we're still experimenting with different pricing and feature options.

I think the key to a successful SaaS business is to really understand your lifetime values, and how churn affects it. It can really help you define a successful marketing campaign.

Every model I've ever run on digital marketing shows that it will take approximately 5 to 12 months for it to start paying off. Add in your other overhead and it takes 2 years before you really start making money. But at that point, you will start making serious money.

To summarize, the most effective marketing tactics I've used are:

- competitive upgrades - referrals credits - e-mail marketing - white label branding of the same service with a major player in your industry (yes, you'll cannibalize some of your other sales but can be worth it) - google adwords

Once they are in, try to quickly onboard them. Once people start deriving value, churn decreases significantly.

Actually, faster focusing, better lenses (and thus better bokeh) do make a difference.

I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes.

I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. You don't need more than 200PPI for larger prints and thus can save a lot.

In fact, considering most people order prints 11x14 and smaller, having the larger megapixels actually hurt quality because the printers (Fuji, Durst, etc.) downsample the files and you lose sharpness if you send them the large file (which most photographers do).

For my wedding shooting, I never need a larger file than 12 megapixels as that's large enough for a 30x40 at 300 dpi. I prefer to save the hard drive space.

The Fair Tax would take care of most of that. Any transaction with a business would have sales tax. There are no write offs, so the business asset would not fly, neither would be buying Ferraris.

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=HowFairTaxWo...

Where does your 1/3 liberal come from? I cannot find that anywhere. You are corrected they were not targeted for AUDITS, but they were targeted.

It is not just the problem that they were targeted based on name (I actually think that's pretty reasonable) but the questions that were asked, the time it took to get approved (or denied) and the fact that IRS lied to congress about it.

Lewis Libby did not out Valerie Plame's status. It was reporter Robert Novak who did. It was also never 'leaked' as political retribution.

"In late August 2006, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage revealed publicly that Novak had based his disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's CIA identity on then still-classified information that Armitage initially gave him while Armitage was still serving in the State Department." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair_timeline

Simply Studio / 17 Hats (http://simplystudio.com/) - IRVINE, CA / REMOTE (US/CANADA preferred)

We're looking for a senior web developer to join our team. We're building a fantastic one-stop SAAS app for one person businesses. It handles everything from invoicing, to contact management, to online contracts, to accounting and more. Over the past year we've built the initial version of the app for the photographers. It's been very successful and we're ready to move on to other industries.

This is where you come in! As we grow, we need somebody who can take care of building new front end functionality, as well as fix the occassional bug in our current feature set. The front end of the app is a single page app, using Sammy.js and Knockout.js. We built our own MVC framework that kicks ass, and is very easy to use.

We're looking for the person who loves coding challenges, and can figure out the best solution in a reasonable matter of time. A person who will work with our UX designer (who creates the necessary HTML and CSS) to implement the design. A person who understands that real businesses use our software on a daily basis and the importance of writing code that does what we expect.

You'll be joining a small but very experienced development and design team. We've been making scalable SAAS applications for over 15 years with over 10,000 clients. Since 2010, we've been using AWS for basically everything.

Skills & Requirements

Must haves:

- Great understanding of writing re-useable Javascript

- Understand JSON structures

- Experience with 'single page' web application

- Have written a jQuery plugin

- Know your way around HTML and CSS

- Tons of Ajax experience

Plus:

- Server side experience with MySQL

- Perl experience

- Knockout.js experience

- Amazon AWS experience

An interest in (small) business would be another plus.

About Simply Studio / 17Hats

We're self-financed and profitable. The position is available now, and it is possible to tele-commute. Currently our team is location all over the country and Canada. If you live in the LA area, you would still work from home (or your favorite coffee shop) but we'd meet up once a week or so to go over the latest developments.

There's always a lot going on, which means every day is different. There are always new challenges. With our current user base, it is very rewarding when you see the responses come in after you release a new feature or fix an existing issue.

If you love front end app development, we're the place for you!

Salary range, depending on experience, is between $80,000 and $120,000 (US Dollars).

Please drop us an email at jobs@simplystudio.com

Yes, I am. I am sure there are big differences (especially in the outcome) but both were losing money in the hope of building an audience, and to lower costs later.

As Hsieh wrote:

"Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we'd put our company culture above all else. We'd bet that by being good to our employees -- for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center -- we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth. Amazingly, it all seemed to be working. By 2005, gross merchandise sales were $370 million, and we made the Inc. 500. We weren't profitable yet, but we were close to breaking even, and our revenue was growing quickly."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html

Seems pretty similar to me. The only difference is that Zappos went after a much larger market.

Reading the Ecomom story it reminds me of Zappos. That company too was losing a lot of money. It only sold to Amazon after their investors refused to put more money in.

The Ecomom story is pretty mind boggling from a sound business perspective, but then so is Zappos. And look how celebrated Tony Hsieh is. And guess who was also an investor in Ecomom?