4 ms·

Slides obviously miss a lot of context if you didn't attend the presentation, so I'd love to chat with folks or answer questions if anybody has them.

bradleyjoyce 15y ago
would be very cool if you could do a voice over of the presentation or something like that. nice work man!
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  I'll give it some thought, but I've always failed miserably at trying to do that. I'm thinking it's easier/more efficient for everyone if focus on answering questions.
ed209 15y ago
it's like reading a slide show of my current life up to about 33% of the way through... I'm starting the next 67% now. I got more questions than you've got time... but.. we're you ever scared of promoting / launching your product in case people thought it wasn't good enough (yet)?
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  Every day. In my mind, it will never be good enough. I've found that the philosophy that has worked best for me is that if you're not embarrassed, you've waited to long to launch. (I believe Matt Mullenweg said that, but I've heard it so many places now, I'm not 100% sure.)
  - timcraft 15y ago
    Reid Hoffman: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1718-if-you-review-your-first-site-version-and http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1718-if-you-review-your-first... http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/15/reid-hoffman-10-rules-of-entrepreneurship/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/15/reid-hoffman-10-rules-of-e... http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/why-being-embarrassed-is-critical-to-the-success-of-your-startup/ http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/... http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/reid-hoffman-startup-school/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/reid-hoffman-startup-school...
mhd 15y ago
Hi Garrett. I was at your presentation at Schnitzelconf last year -- if I remember correctly, that was just after you quit your day job to work on Sifter full time. Now one of your biggest concerns back then was availability – first your application's, and then yours, because of the former. You mentioned that you were quite concerned whenever you were away from a computer or even a mobile internet appliance. You mentioned this concern in the slides, especially at the very end. What's your current situation in this regard, both from the personal (worry, sleep lost etc.) and the technical side (high availability, outsourced admin etc)? And what's your outlook on that for the near future? This is one of the major benefits of having a "proper" startup, as you can share the load. For a bootstrapped single founder, it's a pretty big issue – or at least it appears to be one (most web apps don't really need five nines – unless it's your web app).
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  I generally worry a lot less these days. There are other people involved now as well, including a sys admin on retainer, and it's been a huge change. I'm probably more neurotic about it than most people, and definitely more neurotic than I needed to be. The reality is that Sifter almost never goes down, and when it does, it's usually something outside of our control and gets resolved fairly quickly by our host. Now that we're in a higher availability environment, that's helping a lot too. The outlook is pretty great now. It was definitely hard at the beginning, but most of that was self-imposed. Now that I recognize how rarely Sifter does go down or have performance issues, I know that I don't need to worry as much. It was a difficult lesson to learn though.
  - wizard_2 15y ago
    What is your "higher availability environment"?
    - mhd 15y ago
      According to the blog[1], it's Rackspace. [1]: http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/08/sifters-new-hosting/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/08/sifters-new-hostin...
sixtofour 15y ago
This is worth the read, thanks. What fraud did you experience? How did you transition from (presumably) VPS -> whatever -> current high availability hosting. What prompted you to start each transition, "we have enough money to do it" or "we have X, Y and Z problems?"
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  The fraud was someone that was using us to validate stolen credit cards. They ran about 100 test transactions before we could lock it down. It took a while because we didn't want to detrimentally affect our customers just to stop it. So, it cost us some money in transaction fees, but beyond that, it wasn't a big deal. As far as the transitions, it was partially cost and having extra cash and partially just being ready for it based on growing traffic or new functionality. It was never the same set of motivations. Fortunately, we never grew so fast that we didn't have time to scale with the growth. So, it was a combination of "things are slowing down a bit" and "we have the money to take the next step" and "we ought to have a better hosting environment".
  - vailripper 15y ago
    Which HA environment did you go with?
    - garrettdimon 15y ago
      We went with Rackspace's Cloud Servers. We're using their load balancers with a couple of app servers, a background processing/search indexing server, and 2 database servers for a master/slave setup.
jayp 15y ago
Slide 38 says: "No custom statuses. This one decision defines Sifter." What does "No custom statuses" mean? Can you please elaborate? PS: Thanks for sharing. Great slide deck.
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  It's a feature within Sifter. Here's a few blog posts that go over the details. http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/bug-issue-tracking/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/bug-issue-tracking... http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/tracker-status-comments/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/tracker-status-com... http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/07/resolved-vs-closed/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/07/resolved-vs-closed...
- dsteinweg 15y ago
  My guess is that since Sifter is a bug-tracking app, "no custom statuses" means a user can't provide a custom status for a particular bug--only pre-set options like "Open", "Assigned", "Resolved", etc.
christonog 15y ago
If the majority of your revenue was from the small & medium accounts, why not just create a single plan, remove the lower plans entirely? Why continue with the personal plan if that resulted in higher turnover and less desirable customers?
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  Because the two smallest plans, while having high turnover, have also ultimately generated 65% of our revenue. So at this point, they're still a very important part of our customer base. As far as only offering one plan, it simply doesn't make sense for us. Our costs go up based on the amount of usage, so it makes sense for the price to go up for customers who use more resources.
  - christonog 15y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. This is a great resource. My only regret is that I wasn't there to listen in!
  - mhd 15y ago
    There's also a psychological aspect. Although I don't think it's as important on the lower end, as opposed to the people who believe they're actually being somewhat frugal by not choosing the (often mostly superfluous) "deluxe* version.
Silhouette 15y ago
Would you mind saying a bit more about why you felt building your own billing system was a bad idea? We're looking into that at the moment, and have been considering the usual options of DIY, using Recurly/Chargify/similar, going quick and dirty with Paypal/Google, etc. Right now, after a great deal of investigation and contacting many organisations for more details, we are overwhelmingly thinking that a simple, direct system with a payment gateway and merchant account is the way to go. None of the usual recurring billing suspects has even come close to justifying the costs and usually lock-in of integrating their service instead. However, in the HN goldfish bowl, almost everyone seems to have a different view (though I have noticed a few dissenting voices creeping in recently). Right now, all we've done is a bit of prototyping with the test system for the service we're looking at using and a thorough read of the docs. If we're about to enter a world of pain when we actually want this stuff to work, it would be good to hear any advice about how to minimise the damage and make it through! Great slides, BTW. Thanks for sharing.
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  The main reason that I don't personally believe it's a good idea is that it's not a core part of Sifter. We use Braintree and process everything via ActiveMerchant, but we've been using Braintree so long that we're actually on their old API. Obviously, since we built it in house, I don't have any hands on experience with the other options that are out there now, but from what I've seen with other applications, I can't see any reason not to use the other providers. The downside to not building your own system is that you may lose some control over things like invoice formatting or other parts of the user experience. The other aspect that's a big consideration is PCI compliance. We don't store any payment information on our servers, but it does pass through our servers which means we have to have the minimum amount of PCI compliance. By offloading it to another provider, you're almost entirely free of any significant PCI compliance. Now that it's done, it's kind of nice having full control over every detail of how we handle credit cards. However, I wouldn't do it again now that there are so many other options out there.
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I can understand your reasoning, but I think perhaps our situation is different. For future reference, you might like to know that there are now regular payment gateway/merchant account combinations where you can use their systems to handle the final part of the transaction so you never even have card numbers on your network, so the PCI DSS issues are moot, at least here in the UK. The lock-in isn't ideal, but as far as I know only Recurly out of the major billing services doesn't effectively lock you in just as badly anyway. However, we've found that the recurring billing platforms tend to lack precisely the kind of flexibility you mentioned above. We have all kinds of plans to use promotional codes, multiple offerings that users can subscribe to individually or in combination, etc. As far as we can tell, none of the "big name" billing services even gets close to supporting this kind of stuff properly yet. For the benefit of anyone else following this discussion, I'll also mention that because we're in the UK but most (all?) of those billing services are across the Atlantic, there are serious concerns about legal differences, particularly data protection/privacy rules, and about tax, particularly how VAT is handled. Again, the billing services whose terms and conditions we've checked out had deal-breakers here. Given that the billing services take a relatively large cut out of the payments, sometimes with terms that don't even guarantee any particular level of service, and that we'd have to implement a whole bunch of things on top of their platform anyway, we concluded that they simply don't offer enough to justify the risks and overheads.
revorad 15y ago
Great story! Thanks for sharing. Did you hire any freelancers or interns to get help when you were working alone? I'm considering doing that now to help me with some backend support work, while I focus on the core product. These are little jobs which need to be done to help me move faster. If you did, do you have any tips or advice?
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  We haven't really done much with freelancers. Some of the design work and a little bit of development was outsourced to friends that we already had relationships with. These days we have a sys admin and bookkeeper on retainer so they help a little bit every month, but for the most part, we keep all of the work in house. I don't really have any tips or advice beyond making sure that you meet people and build the relationships long before you need them. Then, you have people that you trust that you can turn to when you're ready.
nikcub 15y ago
can you tell us more about where you advertised, what the rates and returns were like, and if you used anything to measure ad ROI?
- garrettdimon 15y ago
  FusionAds, Daring Fireball RSS sponsorhip, RailsCasts, Dribbble, and a variety of other spots. In terms of ROI, we weren't really measuring things in that great of detail. We just used Google Analytics to understand the quality of the traffic. The rates and returns were all over the board. The only consistent factor was that once Sifter became more well known, the advertising was significantly less effective at generating advertising. So, it's great for finding new traffic and getting the word out, but once that's done, we'd have throw a lot of money at it to see significant results.

bradleyjoyce 15y ago

would be very cool if you could do a voice over of the presentation or something like that. nice work man!

garrettdimon 15y ago
I'll give it some thought, but I've always failed miserably at trying to do that. I'm thinking it's easier/more efficient for everyone if focus on answering questions.

ed209 15y ago

it's like reading a slide show of my current life up to about 33% of the way through... I'm starting the next 67% now. I got more questions than you've got time... but.. we're you ever scared of promoting / launching your product in case people thought it wasn't good enough (yet)?

garrettdimon 15y ago
Every day. In my mind, it will never be good enough. I've found that the philosophy that has worked best for me is that if you're not embarrassed, you've waited to long to launch. (I believe Matt Mullenweg said that, but I've heard it so many places now, I'm not 100% sure.)
- timcraft 15y ago
  Reid Hoffman: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1718-if-you-review-your-first-site-version-and http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1718-if-you-review-your-first... http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/15/reid-hoffman-10-rules-of-entrepreneurship/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/15/reid-hoffman-10-rules-of-e... http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/why-being-embarrassed-is-critical-to-the-success-of-your-startup/ http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/... http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/reid-hoffman-startup-school/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/reid-hoffman-startup-school...

mhd 15y ago

Hi Garrett. I was at your presentation at Schnitzelconf last year -- if I remember correctly, that was just after you quit your day job to work on Sifter full time. Now one of your biggest concerns back then was availability – first your application's, and then yours, because of the former. You mentioned that you were quite concerned whenever you were away from a computer or even a mobile internet appliance. You mentioned this concern in the slides, especially at the very end. What's your current situation in this regard, both from the personal (worry, sleep lost etc.) and the technical side (high availability, outsourced admin etc)? And what's your outlook on that for the near future? This is one of the major benefits of having a "proper" startup, as you can share the load. For a bootstrapped single founder, it's a pretty big issue – or at least it appears to be one (most web apps don't really need five nines – unless it's your web app).

garrettdimon 15y ago
I generally worry a lot less these days. There are other people involved now as well, including a sys admin on retainer, and it's been a huge change. I'm probably more neurotic about it than most people, and definitely more neurotic than I needed to be. The reality is that Sifter almost never goes down, and when it does, it's usually something outside of our control and gets resolved fairly quickly by our host. Now that we're in a higher availability environment, that's helping a lot too. The outlook is pretty great now. It was definitely hard at the beginning, but most of that was self-imposed. Now that I recognize how rarely Sifter does go down or have performance issues, I know that I don't need to worry as much. It was a difficult lesson to learn though.
- wizard_2 15y ago
  What is your "higher availability environment"?
  - mhd 15y ago
    According to the blog[1], it's Rackspace. [1]: http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/08/sifters-new-hosting/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/08/sifters-new-hostin...

sixtofour 15y ago

This is worth the read, thanks. What fraud did you experience? How did you transition from (presumably) VPS -> whatever -> current high availability hosting. What prompted you to start each transition, "we have enough money to do it" or "we have X, Y and Z problems?"

garrettdimon 15y ago
The fraud was someone that was using us to validate stolen credit cards. They ran about 100 test transactions before we could lock it down. It took a while because we didn't want to detrimentally affect our customers just to stop it. So, it cost us some money in transaction fees, but beyond that, it wasn't a big deal. As far as the transitions, it was partially cost and having extra cash and partially just being ready for it based on growing traffic or new functionality. It was never the same set of motivations. Fortunately, we never grew so fast that we didn't have time to scale with the growth. So, it was a combination of "things are slowing down a bit" and "we have the money to take the next step" and "we ought to have a better hosting environment".
- vailripper 15y ago
  Which HA environment did you go with?
  - garrettdimon 15y ago
    We went with Rackspace's Cloud Servers. We're using their load balancers with a couple of app servers, a background processing/search indexing server, and 2 database servers for a master/slave setup.

jayp 15y ago

Slide 38 says: "No custom statuses. This one decision defines Sifter." What does "No custom statuses" mean? Can you please elaborate? PS: Thanks for sharing. Great slide deck.

garrettdimon 15y ago
It's a feature within Sifter. Here's a few blog posts that go over the details. http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/bug-issue-tracking/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/bug-issue-tracking... http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/tracker-status-comments/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2007/08/tracker-status-com... http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/07/resolved-vs-closed/ http://journal.sifterapp.com/blog/2011/07/resolved-vs-closed...
dsteinweg 15y ago
My guess is that since Sifter is a bug-tracking app, "no custom statuses" means a user can't provide a custom status for a particular bug--only pre-set options like "Open", "Assigned", "Resolved", etc.

christonog 15y ago

If the majority of your revenue was from the small & medium accounts, why not just create a single plan, remove the lower plans entirely? Why continue with the personal plan if that resulted in higher turnover and less desirable customers?

garrettdimon 15y ago
Because the two smallest plans, while having high turnover, have also ultimately generated 65% of our revenue. So at this point, they're still a very important part of our customer base. As far as only offering one plan, it simply doesn't make sense for us. Our costs go up based on the amount of usage, so it makes sense for the price to go up for customers who use more resources.
- christonog 15y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. This is a great resource. My only regret is that I wasn't there to listen in!
- mhd 15y ago
  There's also a psychological aspect. Although I don't think it's as important on the lower end, as opposed to the people who believe they're actually being somewhat frugal by not choosing the (often mostly superfluous) "deluxe* version.

Silhouette 15y ago

Would you mind saying a bit more about why you felt building your own billing system was a bad idea? We're looking into that at the moment, and have been considering the usual options of DIY, using Recurly/Chargify/similar, going quick and dirty with Paypal/Google, etc. Right now, after a great deal of investigation and contacting many organisations for more details, we are overwhelmingly thinking that a simple, direct system with a payment gateway and merchant account is the way to go. None of the usual recurring billing suspects has even come close to justifying the costs and usually lock-in of integrating their service instead. However, in the HN goldfish bowl, almost everyone seems to have a different view (though I have noticed a few dissenting voices creeping in recently). Right now, all we've done is a bit of prototyping with the test system for the service we're looking at using and a thorough read of the docs. If we're about to enter a world of pain when we actually want this stuff to work, it would be good to hear any advice about how to minimise the damage and make it through! Great slides, BTW. Thanks for sharing.

garrettdimon 15y ago
The main reason that I don't personally believe it's a good idea is that it's not a core part of Sifter. We use Braintree and process everything via ActiveMerchant, but we've been using Braintree so long that we're actually on their old API. Obviously, since we built it in house, I don't have any hands on experience with the other options that are out there now, but from what I've seen with other applications, I can't see any reason not to use the other providers. The downside to not building your own system is that you may lose some control over things like invoice formatting or other parts of the user experience. The other aspect that's a big consideration is PCI compliance. We don't store any payment information on our servers, but it does pass through our servers which means we have to have the minimum amount of PCI compliance. By offloading it to another provider, you're almost entirely free of any significant PCI compliance. Now that it's done, it's kind of nice having full control over every detail of how we handle credit cards. However, I wouldn't do it again now that there are so many other options out there.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I can understand your reasoning, but I think perhaps our situation is different. For future reference, you might like to know that there are now regular payment gateway/merchant account combinations where you can use their systems to handle the final part of the transaction so you never even have card numbers on your network, so the PCI DSS issues are moot, at least here in the UK. The lock-in isn't ideal, but as far as I know only Recurly out of the major billing services doesn't effectively lock you in just as badly anyway. However, we've found that the recurring billing platforms tend to lack precisely the kind of flexibility you mentioned above. We have all kinds of plans to use promotional codes, multiple offerings that users can subscribe to individually or in combination, etc. As far as we can tell, none of the "big name" billing services even gets close to supporting this kind of stuff properly yet. For the benefit of anyone else following this discussion, I'll also mention that because we're in the UK but most (all?) of those billing services are across the Atlantic, there are serious concerns about legal differences, particularly data protection/privacy rules, and about tax, particularly how VAT is handled. Again, the billing services whose terms and conditions we've checked out had deal-breakers here. Given that the billing services take a relatively large cut out of the payments, sometimes with terms that don't even guarantee any particular level of service, and that we'd have to implement a whole bunch of things on top of their platform anyway, we concluded that they simply don't offer enough to justify the risks and overheads.

revorad 15y ago

Great story! Thanks for sharing. Did you hire any freelancers or interns to get help when you were working alone? I'm considering doing that now to help me with some backend support work, while I focus on the core product. These are little jobs which need to be done to help me move faster. If you did, do you have any tips or advice?

garrettdimon 15y ago
We haven't really done much with freelancers. Some of the design work and a little bit of development was outsourced to friends that we already had relationships with. These days we have a sys admin and bookkeeper on retainer so they help a little bit every month, but for the most part, we keep all of the work in house. I don't really have any tips or advice beyond making sure that you meet people and build the relationships long before you need them. Then, you have people that you trust that you can turn to when you're ready.

nikcub 15y ago

can you tell us more about where you advertised, what the rates and returns were like, and if you used anything to measure ad ROI?

garrettdimon 15y ago
FusionAds, Daring Fireball RSS sponsorhip, RailsCasts, Dribbble, and a variety of other spots. In terms of ROI, we weren't really measuring things in that great of detail. We just used Google Analytics to understand the quality of the traffic. The rates and returns were all over the board. The only consistent factor was that once Sifter became more well known, the advertising was significantly less effective at generating advertising. So, it's great for finding new traffic and getting the word out, but once that's done, we'd have throw a lot of money at it to see significant results.