garrettdimon

11 ms·

1. 61.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   EDIT: Added a table of contents and a more obvious link to the sample chapter. Thanks! Working on adding a table of contents now. The sample chapter is available here: http://startingandsustaining.com/StartingSustainingSample.pd... It's l
2. 62.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear that you're disappointed about the price. We've considered selling the book separately, but it's all really a package deal as there are quite a few references to the spreadsheet throughout the book
3. 63.▲
   Two-factor Authentication for App.net(blog.app.net)

   20 points by garrettdimon 14y ago|6 comments
4. 64.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   I can't tell from your question if you're asking for a simple "performance" or "redundancy" answer or if you're asking for a deeper explanation about application architecture. So, I'll try to answer both. The short answer is redundancy. Wit
5. 65.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   "Spend" is a very misleading and even distracting metric. Before going to deep into this, it's worth noting that you should never rely on advertising as your sole source of traffic generation when bootstrapping. It gets expensive, and it ge
6. 66.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   Trials and free accounts are two very different things. Free accounts implies that they are perpetually available at no cost.
7. 67.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   Keith doesn't draw a salary at all. His equity is large enough that he's simply banking on the day that we stop re-investing 100% of our profit and start paying out some sort of dividends.
8. 68.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   That wasn't time tracking. That was just the number of hours in a year. :) I was pretty bad and really worried about things almost non-stop. So it was a bit of an exaggeration--but not much.
9. 69.▲
   by garrettdimon 14y ago

   No problems yet. (Knock on wood.) We never had any ambition plans of raising money or going public, so we just wanted the simplest structure that wouldn't require extra costs or overhead. There might be tax implications, but that's more the
10. 70.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I answered this in a little more detail further down the page, but the short version is that I didn't really have a customer acquisition strategy. I just had a little overlap from my blogging and a product that I wanted to build. The rest w
11. 71.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    It's both. The upside is that I didn't need to find a designer or developer to build it, but the downside is that it's a lot of work to keep up with all of the skills that I need. Ruby, Rails, design, front-end development, MySQL, servers,
12. 72.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    It's an LLC, but for better or worse, that's not a decision that we put a lot of time into. So it's probably not a meaningful data point.
13. 73.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    It was just a matter of running some SQL queries and putting it into iWork Numbers to generate the graphs.
14. 74.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    There wasn't much experimenting. I've always been so heads down on the product, I've been terrible about running tests. I probably rely way too much on my gut feel with decisions like that. That said, removing the $14 plan did not hurt us a
15. 75.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I have finally hit my pre-Sifter salary. We could have technically afforded it a while ago, but we only recently decided to make the adjustment. Of course, that was my salary 5 years ago, and from what I've gathered, I'm still way under wha
16. 76.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Unfortunately, there's not a recording, but I'm doing my best to expand on the slides and add in the year's worth of lessons learned since this deck into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com
17. 77.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I hear this question a lot. Unfortunately, there's not a simple answer. In my case, it was a matter of blogging for years, building up a modest, but interested, audience, having about 2,000 Twitter followers at the time, and spending about
18. 78.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    This deck is over a year old. A lot has changed. I'm not really a fan of disclosing actual revenue numbers because that opens a whole other can of worms. As such, I chose revenue and how it related to our ability to pay me a salary.
19. 79.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Author of the deck here. I'm actually in the middle of evolving these into a book. http://startingandsustaining.com Happy to answer any questions anybody might have.
20. 80.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Thanks for the feedback. That's definitely part of the plan. While I'm not quite sure just how detailed it's going to get, I've started on a one-page checklist of the items that I talk about in the book.
21. 81.▲
    Book about Launching and Running a Web Application(startingandsustaining.com)

    50 points by garrettdimon 14y ago|10 comments
22. 82.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Thanks for mentioning it. Intercom is in there, kind of crammed into the "support" category. I'll definitely add Customer.io and create a dedicated category. Ultimately, this wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. It's just a quick list fro
23. 83.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I try to avoid any specific recommendations of services because everybody's needs and priorities are so wildly different. I'm very much of the belief that it's best for people to take a look themselves rather than rely on others' preference
24. 84.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
25. 85.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    Fixed. Thanks!
26. 86.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I believe I'm overlooking how to manually force line breaks in there. Any tips?
27. 87.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. ( http://startingandsustaining.com ) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpfu
28. 88.▲
    Editorially - Write, collaborate on, and talk about a text.(editorially.com)

    2 points by garrettdimon 14y ago|2 comments
29. 89.▲
    Teespring: No-risk Crowd-funded T-shirts(teespring.com)

    1 points by garrettdimon 14y ago|1 comments
30. 90.▲
    by garrettdimon 14y ago

    For me, the biggest difference was that Gumroad only offers to pay via PayPal, as opposed to running payments through Stripe. I've heard way too many horror stories to trust PayPal when selling things online.