terrellm's comments

This road rage incident occurred in California, which has some of the strictest gun regulations in the country.

I so want to get into mechnical keyboards but most of my work is done on a 2015 MacBook Pro and I'm so efficient with the large trackpad - I rest my palms on the laptop and can reach everything with just a pivot of the wrist. I tried the Magic Trackpad, but I kept having to move my forearm and it just slowed me down too much.

What kind of mouse or trackpad is everyone using with these $xxx - $xxxx keyboards?

My wife and I (both 40 today) are a husband-and-wife entrepreneur team that started our software business right out of college at 21. We had our first child at 30 and second at 33. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of my wife's high school classmates who didn't go on to college are already grandparents.

We used our 20's to finish undergraduate college and go on to get our graduate degrees, do some traveling, and build & grow a successful software company. We looked at our 20's as the chance to build a business with little opportunity cost and even less overhead, knowing we had the rest of our life to recover from any failures. We put in a lot of hard & long hours, dealt with financial ups-and-downs, and had to learn how to build a team.

Today our software company, now a SaaS and e-commerce business, is stable and has a solid team in place. Being established, along with our kids enrolled in online school, enables us to have a significant amount of flexibility for family. We spend just over half of our year in Texas and the rest in Colorado. Work still has to get done, but we can work around family now.

I couldn't imagine us trying to build a business from scratch, especially as a husband-and-wife team, while also trying to raise kids.

Congrats Sol. I know you've been working hard on putting together a great source.

RailsMachine. Very pleased with the service, too.

Recently I saw where the shipping increased based on the price of an item. I bought Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 ($419) and the Prime next day price was $7.99. I guess they figure that if I'm spending $400+ on an item, a couple bucks more won't make-it-or-break-it for me.

We (my wife and I) hired my mom to run my e-commerce stores after she retired. She is paid an above-average hourly rate, can set her hours, and can work from home. Knowing that we would be giving someone access to a merchant account that has a significant amount of money run through it each month, we had to have someone we could trust to process refunds and occasionally charge additional amounts when orders were upgraded.

She spends 1-3 hours a day managing the stores while my dad works on his model trains. It's enough to keep her busy, have a sense of accomplishment similar to her old job, provide a little extra income - all while not cramping their retirement.

I was a little nervous at first - more about her feeling pressure to make us happy than us being satisfied with her work. However, her role is clearly defined (answer emails, return phone calls, and submitted/track orders to our supplier, etc). This reduces the chance of misunderstandings or let-downs than would be more likely to occur with a less defined role like strategy or marketing.

On our ranch, we have an automatic gate opener with keypad. While FedEx and UPS will use a key code if one is printed on the address label, USPS refuses to enter through an open gate. Maybe they were just afraid of the cattle (http://www.LonghornSteers.com).

Fortunately for us, UPS delivers virtually all of our Amazon orders (2-3 a week since it is easier to use Prime than drive into town). The day that Amazon uses USPS for us is the day we cancel Prime, too.

The only worse delivery company we have dealt with is DHL, who Microsoft uses. I think it stands for (D)ump the package (H)aul tail away, and (L)ie that no one was home. On numerous occasions, DHL has left thousands of dollars worth in software at our gate which is on a busy country road.

A tip that I have found with delivery drivers is to be nice and get to know them. Smile, ask them how they are doing, offer them a bottle of water on a hot day, etc. Many will go out of their way to help a friendly face.

Long time reader of the site and nice to see your post on HN. Thanks for sharing everything and good luck with the sale.

Dropshipping can be a great compliment to an existing software business, offering a nice way of increasing customer lifetime value. My wife and I develop & market CattleMax, a web app for cattle ranchers to manage their herds.

A few years ago, we were approached by a manufacturer who asked if we would become a reseller for their animal identification tags. We thought we'd try it out for a few months so we setup a store so our customers could buy from us online. Several years later, business has grown beyond just our software customers and we have launched another dropship store with another manufacturer.

I develop a Rails 3 web app and recently moved from MySQL to MariaDB. Well actually the guys at Rails Machine did the move for me. I don't know what all they did on their end, so can't speak much for the server admin side. We ended up making the switch since I was moving to a high availability setup with multiple DB servers.

On the web app side, I am using the mysql2 gem and made zero changes to my code. Also, I frequently import SQL dumps from MariaDB into my local MySQL development with no problems.

The only issue I had was related to some nasty SQL I had in a select in a finder (yeah I know bad practice). MySQL was returning a 0 while MariaDB returned NULL. Either way, it was my fault for messy code and when I fixed the select, everything was good.

My 5 year old really loves playing Kodable. Congrats on creating a educational game.

For those looking for a smaller city and/or more conservative city than Austin, check out Bryan/College Station 90 miles away. BCS is home to 50,000 students at Texas A&M University and also TAMU Startup Aggieland.

If any HN'ers are in the area or interested in the area, feel free to email me (contact info in my profile).

I sell a SaaS product with an average price of around $18/month. We (my wife and I) aren't afraid to pick up the phone and call someone... even if it means finding their phone number on a website or online phone book.

The typical account expired / billing problem call is usually along the lines of the customer saying something like "I got your emails and have been meaning to get my billing info updated... can you help me with that now?". Customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.

The occasional cancellation request call often starts with us saying "I understand you had some questions about [our product]. How can I help you?". Next, the customer says "I like your product but it [was too expensive / did not have feature X / seemed hard to use] and I want to cancel." We always agree to honor the request but also add a "well did you know...". Our save rate is over 75%. Again customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.

If a customer took the time to sign up for your product, try it out, and maybe even give you money... they recognize they have a problem that needs solving. Sometimes a personal call can be a great way to help a customer find a solution to their problem.

I can't recall the last time we had someone be anything but appreciative when we called them. The world moves so fast nowadays and life gets in the way, so people can easily become distracted. A little personal touch can sometimes go a long way.

The article title gives the puppy image credit but I think the additional text had as much if not more of an impact on the conversion lift than the image.

  "Start your 30 days free trial" text 

vs

  "*Sign up now* 30 days free rial.  Pick a plan & sign up in 60 seconds.  Upgrade, downgrade, cancel at any time." with a puppy image.

The second version is so much better because it tells the viewer what to expect... the 60 second signup, flexibility in changing plans, no long-term commitments. The dog image does help since he is looking at the call-to-action, which also draws the viewer's eyes there too.

It is a great post and just goes to show how testing can really help boost conversion. It's often a lot cheaper to grow your business by improving conversion rates than by increasing traffic.

This guide has some great information. A dropship commerce store can be a great complement to a software company if you are able to integrate a company's products in with your software.

My wife and I develop a cattle management software called CattleMax and began operating two dropship e-commerce stores several years ago. Our stores help us offer customers a full solution (identification + weighing/measuring + management software) and also provide a nice supplement to our SaaS revenues.

Our first store, The Cattle Tags Store (CattleTags.com), sells cattle identification supplies including visual ear tags and RFID tags & readers. Our software is useless of the rancher hasn't identified his or her cattle, so good identification is important.

Our second store, The Cattle Scales Store (CattleScales.com), sells digital weigh scales designed for weighing livestock. It is a natural fit since our software can import weights from the scales and these scales also integrate with the RFID readers we sell at The Cattle Tags Store.

In the beginning, we were hesitant to create the stores but got through that hesitation by saying "OK we will try it out for a few months".

You are right... my mistake. I was looking on a different page of the old bootstrap site.

The Responsive Utilities section is interesting with new classes such as .visible-phone and .hidden-phone (also tablet and desktop) but I find in my app that my customers want to see all of the columns even if it means a little bit of scrolling.

Zurb takes an interesting approach with their responsive tables (http://www.zurb.com/playground/responsive-tables).

Wow looks nice. Is an SSL certificate still required since the JS is on Stripe's secure server?

We've had several of these companies approach our agriculture software company over the years. The key phrase to listen for is "scheduling fee" as that's what they call the $15k - $25k fee.

The most recent pitch was last year and the special host was to be Terry Bradshaw.

Agreed - particularly if you are the advertiser paying for a ton of "curiosity clicks" from people wondering where the ad goes.

It would have been interesting to see a measurable goal (downloads, newsletter signups, watch a 3 minute video... something measurable) and how the conversions were across the two ads.

The MS Paint ad still may have more total conversions but it would be interesting to see how the cost per conversion compares. If both cost per conversions are within budget, then by all means go full speed ahead with MS Paint.