dmgrow

When considering pricing for software, it's important to consider more than just the initial sale. It needs to be a comprehensive view of customer lifetime value.

One of the critical things in my current business is the upgrade path for customers. We have many customers who start with one license but quickly scale to 5, then 25, then 50 and beyond.

Having a lower price point to get people into your product can be a very effective strategy if there is a clear upgrade strategy for each customer.

I thought the book was also pretty interesting. Paulson was in a very difficult position -- one I certainly do not envy -- so his first-hand perspective was worth the read.

Thanks! The price point definitely helps pull away customers from Visio. It is pretty common for us to see a customer get rid of 10 Visio licenses and buy 100+ Lucidchart licenses in its place.

More often than not though, it's the other features -- realtime collaboration, integration with platforms like Google Apps/Drive, and general ease of use -- that seals the deal vs. Visio.

Great to hear! If you have any feedback, please let us know. Any killer features missing in your opinion?

We have got some big and fun things coming in the next few months.

Thanks. The instant demo converts quite well. If you have a product where it makes sense to do it, I'd recommend it.

There's a significant segment that doesn't want to provide an email address just to try something quickly to see if ts the right fit.

My team and I have been working on Lucidchart for a little while now.

https://www.lucidchart.com

It's an HTML5 diagramming and wireframing app. We've had some coverage but are still in the early stages in this billion dollar per year industry. Happy to set you up with an interview with one of our founders.

That definitely looks similar.

Lucidchart - Salt Lake City, UT

Lucidchart is a rapidly growing tech startup looking for great backend software engineers to join us at our headquarters in Utah. At Lucidchart, we build killer graphical web applications requiring highly available, secure and scalable backend services. Talent and ability to learn are more important than years of experience. You may have seen Lucidchart demoed during the second Google I/O 2012 keynote:

http://t.co/sd6GgZvy

We're hiring BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEERS. Lucidchart runs with various decoupled services in a Linux environment using Scala, PHP, MongoDB and MySQL. At Lucidchart, your responsibilities would include enhancing existing services, building new services, integrating with 3rd party applications and ensuring services are highly reliable and scalable.

Requirements:

* Talent

Recommended experience:

* Have built large products / applications

* Scala or Java

* PHP

* MySQL or other relational database

* NoSQL databases (MongoDB especially desirable)

* Opscode Chef or Puppet

* Cloud computing (AWS)

We're also hiring FRONTEND SOFTWARE ENGINEERS. We build killer graphical web applications that push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser. Lucidchart is powered by one of the largest Javascript codebases on the Internet, optimized so that the user experience is indistinguishable from an installed native application. Come help us show the tech world what can be done on the web.

Requirements:

* Talent

Recommended experience:

* Have built large products / applications

* Javascript

* Google Closure compiler/library

* CSS/HTML/DOM manipulation

* jQuery

* node.js

* Native app development on Android and/or iOS

* Facebook APIs

All applicants email resumes to jobs@lucidchart.com.

Thanks for mentioning inbound -- hadn't seen that one before and looks good for SEO/marketing/etc.

Are there other similar HN-type sites that are business-oriented?

I think their feature set is probably fairly similar to others. Through some testing of dunning settings and email notifications, we were able to significantly increase the percentage of customers who updated failed credit cards.

More than anything, it was fairly easy to integrate and roll out. We are busy building our core software and it would have taken us a long time to get to the point where we would have prioritized building our own.

I'm glad we didn't wait longer than we did because it has been worth the time and money spent on Recurly.

Recurly did grandfather their early customers (we were one). For the most part, I'm a fan of Recurly and it helped improve our renewal rates. However, the major outage they experienced earlier this year (including substantial data loss) was a real blow.

Yes, it's possible to build. But if building is delaying you from doing it immediately, then buy -- it's worth it.

Lucidchart employee here. Though we don't publicly release total user stats, this recent post about 500,000 installs through the Chrome Web Store gives a hint:

https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/2012/10/31/500000-chrome-web...

Even with 550,000 installs there, the Chrome Web Store is just one of a number of strong channels for Lucidchart and contributes a small minority of our user base.

It looks like all of the charts on that page end in about 2006. The last few years have been quite different. This report includes a comparison of percent change in per student spending in fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2008 in each state:

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3569

The majority of states have seen declines -- some quite significant.

Excellent - thanks for sharing! It's a great model and I'm excited to see it grow.

Of course, the nice thing about Kiva is that it is a loan, rather than a donation, which allows you to use the same initial investment to help lots of people again and again.

Have you guys met up with the Kiva team? This strikes me as such a similar model in many ways.

I imagine they would have an incredible amount of learning from the past several years that they would be willing to share. A lot of this has to do with perfecting the user experience for potential lenders / donors. It seems like you're doing a good job on this front but no doubt there's room for improvement.

I've been a loyal Kiva lender now for years and watched them grow to $375M in loans. I think you're on to something similar with tremendous potential.

Kiva (a similar site for microlending to entrepreneurs in third-world countries) does this. From my personal experience, it's been quite effective and encouraged me to occasionally donate while lending to entrepreneurs.

My view is perhaps a bit limited because I'm in the software industry. Are other industries represented fairly well by the current laws and is it only the software industry that are demanding changes?

Though government is adept at yielding to special interest and industry groups, fundamental change may be difficult to hope for if the software industry is the lone voice at this point.

I would suggest that it depends a lot on the stage of the company. Early on, only build enough that you can legitimately track the key metrics. Other than that, focus on building the product.

As the product and business matures, it's likely that you will need to spend more time to ensure that the business can keep up with the product.

As a PM, I make sure that we've had to do the same thing manually a number of times before we spend any engineering time on automating it, or setting up the tools so that a non-engineer can do it.

Because if you trust your gut, you will often be wrong. There's a reason why the most successful companies regularly A/B test.

We have seen some very significant (and surprising!) results at our startup from A/B testing in terms of registration rate, customer lifetime value and other key metrics.

I appreciate the sentiment. It seems like the most common title/description on Twitter is something to the effect of "CEO and Co-founder of _________ "

Everyone wants to be considered an entrepreneur, CEO, or founder or something these days....even if it's only their personal blog or a pet project.

You can find some posts and related information here:

http://www.quora.com/Hacker-News/How-do-you-get-on-the-front...

There was a post back in 2010 with the formula which PG verified. It's probably changed slightly but not substantially since.

Welcome to the 500 family! Lots of great resources and mentors to help continue to accelerate the growth of Baby List.

Definitely agree that more data would be helpful, like:

- What was churn rate before? - Is (new churn + snooze) greater or less than original churn? - What percentage of customers come off of snooze and repurchase?

Without more information, it's impossible to pinpoint whether it really is an effective strategy or just makes a nice headline.