2 ms·

1) Use google apps' email accounts. five nine spam filtering, ime. 2) Web based sing up form, dashboard, and maintenance tools should be very straightforward.

by mahmud 17y ago

1) Use google apps' email accounts. five nine spam filtering, ime. 2) Web based sing up form, dashboard, and maintenance tools should be very straightforward. I reckon you could get that done in a week or so; I would love to license you the tech and get a commission out of every sign up :-) also, You should offer an affiliate service and let us marketing types do the marketing. Offer a commission per sign up and sit back. Mail me if you wanna talk shop. P.S. I refuse to accept the freebie month bro, sorry, but I would rather pay you for your services so you can pay me for mine :-)

lsc 17y ago
Actually, I'm working on that now. But the part I really suck at is billing, so I want to pass that off on the resellers. They'd be providing real value for me then. I've been talking to a few people about this; what I want to do is provide a interface so the resellers can provision new images themselves, charge the resellers a discount on what I charge normally, then let resellers sell and bill at whatever price the markets can bear. This would help me immensely. If I didn't have to screw with billing, I could focus more on the technical stuff, which is what I'm good at. I was going over things the other night, and I'm collecting about half what I'm billing out. (I imagine that many of those accounts are people who want to close the account who didn't bother telling me, but some are probably interested in continuing service.) The question is how do I let resellers differentiate while I am still doing support? I like the idea of letting them set the prices (because some people really do want to pay more, and on the business end of things, I want to provide a commodity. Getting some people to pay more for a commodity than others do is a skill for other people. One that I'm not particularly interested in developing.) Resellers could differentiate on nicer interfaces, and hopefully some of them would be able to have several providers on the backend... you know, kindof like cloudkick; you could buy a vps from cloudkick and they could run it on me, on slicehost, ec2, or linode; that is adding real value for the customer.

by mahmud 17y ago

lsc 17y ago

Actually, I'm working on that now. But the part I really suck at is billing, so I want to pass that off on the resellers. They'd be providing real value for me then. I've been talking to a few people about this; what I want to do is provide a interface so the resellers can provision new images themselves, charge the resellers a discount on what I charge normally, then let resellers sell and bill at whatever price the markets can bear. This would help me immensely. If I didn't have to screw with billing, I could focus more on the technical stuff, which is what I'm good at. I was going over things the other night, and I'm collecting about half what I'm billing out. (I imagine that many of those accounts are people who want to close the account who didn't bother telling me, but some are probably interested in continuing service.) The question is how do I let resellers differentiate while I am still doing support? I like the idea of letting them set the prices (because some people really do want to pay more, and on the business end of things, I want to provide a commodity. Getting some people to pay more for a commodity than others do is a skill for other people. One that I'm not particularly interested in developing.) Resellers could differentiate on nicer interfaces, and hopefully some of them would be able to have several providers on the backend... you know, kindof like cloudkick; you could buy a vps from cloudkick and they could run it on me, on slicehost, ec2, or linode; that is adding real value for the customer.