Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Envato

I think it’s interesting that we started with absolutely zero business experience. Three of us were designers, and my big brother was a physicist. This was good because we weren’t risk-averse, we didn’t really know just how much work we were in for, and sometimes we did things that someone with more experience simply might not have thought of doing. On the other hand it wasn’t so good when it came to building strong foundations for the company. Consequently over the course of Envato’s life, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time going back and laying better foundations for things which we simply didn’t know about. If we ever start another company in the future, we’ll know all about how to set it up right to begin with, but on the other hand I’m sure we’ll be a lot more wary of risk.

via 37signals.com

Such down to grounds idea, such a late time and such a success. Thumbs up!

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"Basement way"

So many people like to say: "I went the basement way.  I gave up on the bells and whistles of corporate job, to start the startup.".  

There some other people who like to say: "You are either doing this or not.  Quit your day job, land in your basement, start building things.".

My question is simple: "What if I do not have even a basement?"

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Initial traction for startup

Maybe that number is different for you, but in all cases, we’re talking about going from no traffic to a certain level of sustainable traffic. The sustainable part is key – a large bump in TechCrunch traffic followed by no long term users does not count (trust me, we went through that once). So traction is the process of getting from customer 0 to customer 10,000 and maintaining a sustainable growth rate.

via blog.newscred.com

NewsCred.com founder shares his experience about getting initial traction for startup company. Interesting.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Experiments in lean pricing

I strongly feel that, especially for SaaS products, starting with free and figuring out premium later (all too common) is backwards. If you know you are going to be charging for your product, start by validating if anyone will pay first. There is no better success metric and it leads to less waste in the long run. Focusing on the premium part of freemium first lets you really learn about your unique value proposition — the stuff that will get you paid. You can then come back and intelligently offer a free plan (if you still want to) with more intelligence and the right success metrics clearly defined. Even if you think you have a one-dimensional pricing plan like I did (e.g. number of projects), you’d be better served testing it with paying users because pricing experiments take a much bigger toll than other types of experiments

via venturehacks.com

Great guest article by Ash Maurya, who went thru and telling about his experience with pricing experiments and how valuable can they be. Although I'm not very agree that free-to-paid approach is backwards most of the time, he's still very right that putting out your original intentions to charge is a great way to start working on your pricing scheme.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost