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missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits.
by plehoux 7y ago
missiveapp.com and conferenceBadge.com, my two startups, have both been rejected at the interview phase. Our yearly revenue for both now stands in the 7 digits. We are still just a team of 3 + 1 employee, 100% bootstrapped. Life is good. My advice, keep pushing!
https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/
https://www.conferencebadge.com https://www.conferencebadge.com
- therealarmen 7y agoConferenceBadge landing page is one of the best I've seen. Nice work!
- cdubzzz 7y agoApropos of nothing, this little marketing page is pretty great -- https://www.conferencebadge.com/why-use-conference-badge https://www.conferencebadge.com/why-use-conference-badge
- throwaway619 7y agoWow, that's fantastic. Clicked on "Try the Slow Way".
- sithlord 7y agoso, it took anna 10 hours, and lets assume anna gets paid 25 dollars an hour, so a cost of 250 dollars. Shelley, used the conference badge, and at 1.79 for the fully shipped version of the badge, it will cost 582 dollars. So, essentially, Shelley paid 332 dollars for QR codes and convenience. Is it worth it? probably. but maybe not.
- plehoux 7y agoBadge printing kits/holders are not free :) https://www.amazon.com/Avery-Badges-Lanyards-Holders-Inserts/dp/B075FXGNN8/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=avery+badges&qid=1560961103&s=gateway&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Avery-Badges-Lanyards-Holders-Inserts...
- ValentineC 7y agoBlank lanyards and card holders are really cheap if bought separately, and one really only needs to make sure that their printer prints 4x6" or A6, instead of buying such an expensive kit.
- TomVDB 7y agoEmpty badges are around ~$0.50. At 325 badges, that reduces the difference by $165.
- whiddershins 7y agoHmmm, I hear you but I’m really skeptical of valuing any full time employee’s time at $25/hour. The true cost of a full time office worker employee once all taxes and benefits are factored in are usually going to be a lot higher than that. This would make the service a lot more worth it. OTOH if that employee is underutilized, their time is effectively free, so the only thing you would be paying for is (hopefully) quality and consistency.
- gheldean 7y agoIt's not just her pay for 10 hours, there is the lost opportunity cost of other work she could have done that day(s) and the supply cost for 325 badges/holders/lanyards/etc...
- djsumdog 7y agoI think this depends on one-off vs long term. If this group is going to be doing 2~3 conferences a year, learning how to print labels yourself or is valuable skill. You might even have a designer on your team that could work with a local print shop (allowing a personal relationship and even last minute badges so you're not handwriting last minute speakers). There's a one time cost of learning all that stuff, and then each year you just reuse those same templates and skills with a new logo/graphics from your design guy. If this is something your team/volunteer group/etc. rarely does, then it's probably worth just paying conference badges. It's a trade-off. If it's a non-profit thing, consider open souring the process and CC licensing the designs to help others doing the same thing.
- ValentineC 7y agoI organise conferences as a hobby, and I've been manually doing mail merge on badges for the past few years. It takes me anywhere between 5–15 minutes to set things up, and my biggest annoyance throughout the process is dealing with CSV character encodings. I think the main value the service provides is that it provides "guaranteed" next-day delivery. My print shop gives me a fair amount of crap for not sending my badges to print a few days in advance. On the other hand, it's so much less work for organisers to print blank white boxes, and let attendees fill in their own preferred names at check-in.
- empath75 7y ago$300 bucks is nothing compared to the costs of running a convention. And also there's other stuff Anna needed to be working on that didn't happen.
- achenatx 7y agoyou dont understand business stakeholders. Shelley is busy and overworked. She is relatively price insensitive, but is very time sensitive. Our (enterprise) business customers dont care about price much, they care about things going smoothly for an event which has a ton of moving parts. We serve a similar demographic.
- tptacek 7y agoThis really is pretty great.
- Apotheos 7y agoFormatting is totally butchered though on my S9. The two columns are sometimes one and sometimes are reversed.
- ahpearce 7y agoY'all hold on to that designer you've got. Those landing pages have a great feel to them.
- davefp 7y agoFYI visiting https://conferencebadge.com https://conferencebadge.com doesn't work, only the insecure or www does.
- belenos46 7y agoThey must have excellent responsiveness; https://www.conferencebadge.com/ https://www.conferencebadge.com/ works fine for me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jniedrauer 7y agoIt doesn't work without the leading slash. They probably all have cached redirects from working locally so they never noticed. 30 second fix on basically any webserver.
- Stratoscope 7y agoTry it without the www.
- autotune 7y agoLittle Terraform and ACME/LetsEncrypt provider with a build pipeline or basic cron job and this is an easy permanent fix.
- joshyeager 7y agoI have a suggestion: add support for dual-clip lanyards[1]. I've always found the single-clip lanyards annoying: they flop around and get twisted. I went to a conference this spring that had lanyards that clipped to both top corners of the badge, and it was significantly less annoying. [1] For example: https://www.marcopromos.com/product/3-4-cotton-no-flip-lanyard-and-badge-holder-combo/ly-16022 https://www.marcopromos.com/product/3-4-cotton-no-flip-lanya...
- hugs 7y agoMore detailed suggestion: Implement all the Badge Reviews tips found at https://badge.reviews/ https://badge.reviews/
- StavrosK 7y agoIn the last few conferences with single-clip lanyards, I started noticing the badges' orientation. I would expect them to be roughly 50% front, 50% back, but significantly more badges were oriented so that the back was showing, which surprised me. I guess it's the same kind of magic that makes the USB port always be the wrong orientation, then you flip it and it's wrong again, and it's only right after you flip it twice.
- mohaba 7y agoSome people don't like showing off all their information, but most venues require the badge to be shown at all times.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- culturestate 7y agoI usually keep my badge facing in (so you can't glance at my info) on purpose if the badge has a lead-gen attendee type - e.g. founder, investor, media - printed on it. I find that having it the right way 'round makes it harder to have interesting or productive discussions because by the end of the first day everyone is pre-judging the people they meet based on their badge. If I'm there on a founder badge, for example, it's difficult to chat up investors because they're wary of hearing the 400th pitch from a random startup guy when I really just want to talk and make a connection. This may be more annoying for me than most because I'm often at conferences as someone's guest, so the badge type rarely matches with my goals for attending.
- vxNsr 7y agoThose both look like amazing companies and I love the website design. but I could kinda see how YC might reject you... they're always looking for the unicorn and neither one of those looks like it's gonna 100x, they look like great businesses that will make tons of money, but possibly not at a scale or within a timeline that would make investors excited.
- pier25 7y agoI gotta say your Medium post about Missive being a hybrid app and beating native UIs in many aspects was pretty inspiring.
- plehoux 7y agoThis is the only reason we can as a tiny team of 3 keep pushing features/improvements[1] on all platforms. Not to say it's perfect. [1] https://missiveapp.com/changelog https://missiveapp.com/changelog
- novok 7y agoI tried out your app on my iPhone X. There are buttons on the bottom that you can't tap (like 'privacy' in the signup screen or 'I prefer to stay alone' in the hamburger menu.) because they are in the swipe up zone. Might want to add a general safety margin to the bottom of of your app for bezeless devices.
- maximente 7y agoplease share a link
- pier25 7y agohttps://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02 https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
- throwaway413 7y agoInspirational, thanks for sharing your story. Gotta keep pushing!
- rufugee 7y agoconferencebadge.com is very interesting to me, as are all niche businesses that can generate 7 digits. Would you care to share how you identified the opportunity and estimated potential revenue?
- rpastuszak 7y agoThe "Why use Conference Badge" section on conferencebadge.com is fantastic.
- xenospn 7y agoI'm not your target audience for either one, but I gotta say the websites are spot on. Really well done.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoFantastic! I love hearing stories like these. Congrats on building a healthy, hopefully profitable, business.
- crabasa 7y agoSir, you just got yourself a ConferenceBadge customer for https://2019.cascadiajs.com https://2019.cascadiajs.com
- cosmodisk 7y agoOK, I'm stealing this idea. Just returned from an exhibition where this whole badge idea was implemented pretty poorly-clearly still a lot of space for improvements.
- usrusr 7y agoWith funding, you might be in the situation of having not a single cent more in revenue (possibly less, trying to buy growth) and failing hard because of having 30 employees more than you have now, and not the tiniest idea of how you could get by with less. The intersection between the set of business opportunities that can work bootstrapped and set of business opportunities that work when strongly funded might be much smaller than one would naively assume.
- calhoun137 7y agoI'm just here to let you know your website designs are aMaZiNg!!!!