TuaAmin13's comments

Black text on white background strikes me as a bit odd. It's in stark contrast to the starburst in the background.

300+ customers but you show me the same static set of images every time. I think it'd be cool if it was random every time I loaded the page.

Your javascript scroll thing isn't smooth on my browser (Chrome fwiw). Also, you're inconsistent with your text branding across login, signup, plans, and product tour.

The month abbreviation is strange. Isn't it just "$XX/mo"?

"Highly regulated" implies to me you should be testing against certain IE versions, and a Firefox 4.0 or something would be in addition to that.

What's the breakdown on customer browser usage? You could be supporting FF7 when actually only FF3.6 is installed on these systems.

I agree with this. The really old and crusty ones are a bit sentimental, but if you get rid of them before they get old and crusty there's no nostalgia.

For instance, I got rid of my Dell laptop that I used for 4 years in college, but it was pretty difficult getting rid of my old Tandy that I had when I was growing up. I'll kindly get off your lawn now :)

I worked at a more research-y branch of my school so we did things a bit differently than everyone else, but I'm going to try to sum this up in a way that I think applies to everything.

1) We have purchasing limits that are strictly enforced via method of payment. For instance we couldn't spend more than $5k per purchasing-card transaction, and no line item could be above $3k. I'm not sure if that applied to physical assets only because that $3k mark was where we had to sticker inventory. Beyond $5k we had to make a departmental purchase order, and beyond $10k(?) we needed a longer PO form (more approvals).

2) We preferred long established vendors, particularly those who were registered with the school. That cuts down on paperwork should we have to go with a DPO. We'll add a new vendor if it's worth it. Anecdote: A friend of mine helped get a T-shirt vendor on to the approved list. The vendor gave his club ~$5k in discounts for helping him get on the list, so it was obviously worth more than $5k being on the list (There's only 3 or so approved shirt vendors).

3) We're concerned about product licensing.

If you're what amounts to an impulse buy, we'll buy it regardless if we think it'll save us more than your product is worth. $100 license for a research scientist making $65,000? Done if he stops complaining to us. Granted, we had a bit more money than the rest of the school departments.

If you're established, we know we can upgrade later or get support.

If you're not established, we either want it to be cheap in case we have to implement something else later, or we want source code, etc so we can maintain it ourselves if you go bust. That takes the pain away (slightly) of you disappearing.

That's unfortunate, but understandable considering how much they squeezed into the machine.

Thanks for the correction.

I like my 13" MBP. It's an older model, so I don't know the screen res off hand, but if you can upgrade for more pixels that'd be good. Some IDEs get cluttery without enough pixels. What I've got is fine though.

Like pashields I'm crunched for RAM so go on Newegg and buy the max you can put in that machine.

I agree. If this guy is a customer instead of (friends, family, etc) for private beta, he's going to represent part of the people paying you for this.

Congratulations. You're basically getting early feedback by someone who really really wants this. He wants a beta to use in production, and he knows that. That's how much he wants it.

Lay down the ground rules as far as production support and bug fix turnarounds based on what you can manage without trying to spend every waking minute keeping them happy. They may not get every new feature request they ask for, and , like you said, some UI might change.

I'm also curious about this. (my username) @yahoo.com

I'd be concerned at the "former boss" part. Do you want to work for him again? Does he want a nice title and is hoping to piggy back off your work? What does your developer think of this potential new social dynamic in the business?

While you could always figure out equity (this is sounding like a first employee type thing, maybe a bit more because he's C-level), your investors may want him to occupy a board seat. There's you, and your designer currently. That's 2 votes and if you can't decide there's no tie breaker. So besides whatever equity you get your former boss gets to determine significantly the direction of your business. Can you handle that, with you and your designer being self proclaimed perfectionists? While obviously you have to trust anyone you bring in, can you trust him specifically? I'm betting you can always find a good sales guy if the answer is no.

EDIT: A final question you might have to ask yourself is: could you fire him as the CEO if he wasn't what your business needed to grow?

I got the email, and I didn't take the "duration" as how long they wanted me to spend on it. I took it as more of a "When you start this, you should be done in X days because we want it by then."

Should I have read it differently?

I use a kind of combination. I would probably be drowning in post-its scattered about my cube at the end of the day. Outlook ToDo's are kinda strange to use, so I picked up a steno pad and I write down all my tasks for the day every day in the morning. I go through and put +/*/- next to each one (after I'm done) for priority. As stuff comes up I add it to the list and assess its priority then.

When I start to work on a task, I open up onenote and break that task in to sub tasks that are more bite sized (a la pomodoro) that I can strikethrough when I'm done. Strikethrough you can add to your quick bar in Office 2010. Using onenote I can expand subtasks if I find they're too large, and if I have to stop working on task A to go to B I know approximately where I left off. Inserting text is difficult on paper.

When all the subtasks are done I delete it from onenote and strike it through on the paper.

Pomodoro is a bit too rigid for me in the office where anyone in the cube farm can interrupt you any time of the day, but it certainly did help me crunch through my 10 page paper during my last semester in college.

"It seems perfectly reasonable to me to respond to this by pointing out that upper-band tax rates have been distinctly higher in the past, and that innovation and wealth creation have done just fine when they were."

In the olden days the top tax rates were incredibly high (90%), but you didn't actually pay that; you had a ton of deductions to lower you actual paid rate.

Forgetting that argument for a second, was there an opportunity cost that doesn't exist today? With those periods of innovation and wealth creation, did they only happen because we were the "best" location at the time? As in, it didn't matter what the rates were because the US was the best place given the infrastructure you require. Now you can go to many places on the globe and get the same stuff done. Wouldn't that imply that the US has to become more competitive in order to promote growth, and part of that competitiveness (the variables we can manipulate) would be lowering marginal income taxes.

Browsing your site, I would kind of suggest that if you got an email address after clicking on pricing & plans (ie they clicked on 1 plan) then that'd be a worthwhile number. The pricing and plans page by itself I would argue is rather meaningless when you have 2 apparent pages of content.

I'm not saying there's not demand; I'm just saying your pricing page CTR doesn't mean exactly what you think it means. There's no FAQ I could have gone to or an about; just 2 offsite links and the pricing page.

For the case of near-line storage I believe this would work. I understand why you would need this in that case.

At that point you'd simply have to address pricing. With some napkin math I just paid $15/TB/month (for duration of warranty) for near-line storage. I'm taking liberties here with assumptions (no power or cooling but this offsets the cost of longer transfers to the cloud vs internal to your data center). I'm also not factoring in personnel costs.

For consumers I have absolutely no idea what the pricing would be like. $15/TB/month seems cheap and I would probably be expecting something between 25 and 100GB for that same price if you told me what your product does.

My $0.02 as a storage administrator (primarily NAS)

It sounds like your "data security" isn't my data security. -"robust, efficient, zero-maintenance offsite storage" -"offsite vs local, cloud storage robustness vs hard disk robustness" When I say data security I mean that my data is encrypted and locked down six ways from Sunday. "Robustness" isn't security. "Offsite" doesn't mean security. I've got turnstiles, card readers, locked cages, and passwords standing between you and my local data. "Cloud storage robustness". That's security from failures, not necessarily security from hackers which is what data security means to me. You say it's encrypted but there's no mention if this is encrypted storage or if it's encrypted information transfer.

Other than you needing to re-evaluate your buzzwords, it sounds like you have a cloud SAN rather than a cloud NAS. That does sound different enough that you could definitely have a niche to pursue. There are programs that work better with SAN storage than NAS storage, but at some level I'm wondering: If I'm running my own MSSQL server (or something else I'd host in house that needs SAN storage), why would I pay for a local server but remote storage? Why wouldn't I just have a remote server with remote storage or a local server with local storage? I'm not immediately seeing the use case, perhaps you can paint me a word picture. Sure 256TB is great, but if you need 256TB you probably have more than enough money to buy your own storage or you have some crazy financial regulations or something that would require you to keep it in house. On the smaller scale, I run in to the "Why am I paying to keep a local file server around to distribute this remote block device?"

Again, a solid use-case or pain point may turn me in to a believer of why I need this product. From what you've described I'm not seeing it, but I like the technology potential.

With a streaming news channel and notifications of upcoming stories you really can call someone, have them turn on the TV (or streamer) and catch the entire story from the beginning like they do in television/movies.

There's Intel appup but I don't know how popular it is. http://www.appup.com/applications/index

I agree that randomness might be a bit better here, or if you could do something like randomize destination (idk didn't sign up).

That way you can send flowers to the significant someone at home one month, the office the next, or something like that.

If you randomized the date of delivery you could do something like a small thing of flowers one week but 5 weeks later a slightly larger arrangement. Along the lines of something I'm thinking of: xkcd/576 and the associated implementation that was posted on hacker news. It doesn't buy something everyday, but sometimes saves up.

But that's complicated! And you have an MVP which is exactly that, minimum. I like it a lot; I'm just not quite in the $49/month club for flowers yet.

As far as "merging" your jobs, this jumps out at me: +plant maintenance management & coordination (around 5 years). +software developer leveraging my plant maintenance experience.

I'm sure you've seen in 5+ years something in plant management that could probably be automated or had a pretty GUI put on top for pretty graphs. Is there anything you can think of that you could look in to developing that you could whitebox and sell to plants for management? Perhaps it was something during your software development experience that you thought would have been cool to pursue but The Man decided to take a different direction?

If you feel you've been out of the loop I'm sure you must have some contacts that would be more than happy to talk to you about their problems.

Initial barriers I see: I know some industries run certain vendor equipment so integrating or even convincing them to buy would be a bit difficult.

My other thought would be to go back to Engineering and use your software experience to make your life easier by automating your daily tasks so you can spend more energy doing something else (working for advancement, not working long weeks, or whatever other goals you have).

I agree with this.

First off, I may consider a name change. Thick lips is ??? whereas Fat Lips means something different. I'm not too up on slang so I don't believe that means anything else other than "giving someone a fat lip" when you hit them. It also works for you because I think what you're getting at is the moles have thick lips. Not sure though.

For "Americanizing" it, you're probably going to have to play with the mechanics/sound effects/art. Wack-a-mole is nothing new; you may have to spice it up with something like bowling pins or baseball bats or chainsaws or ACME anvils or ??? (if you want to keep the melee aspect). I suspect that will keep people playing.

It's like the shooting fishing game that was featured a while back. Fishing games that drop a line is nothing new, but shooting the fish afterwards is novel enough that people will pay for it.