nlavezzo

Excellent article. This was something we learned at our last company, especially early on. Sales people that had previously excelled at large tech companies with a full suite of presentation, training, marketing, and support materials, with a mature and relatively stable product, did not do well in a fast moving environment that required more thought and digging into detail. In the end, our consulting organization (which was much more familiar with our product and customer requirements) ended up being our best pool of sales talent. I'd suggest considering technical consulting types who are working on actual implementations for sales roles.

Yeah, I agree that those were important, maybe more important factors too. But I know alot of my non-tech friends made the move largely because they were sick of myspace spammers constantly contacting them.

Does anyone remember what happened to Myspace? Of course it was complicated, but I think the primary driver in the exodus from Myspace to Facebook were the perceived privacy benefits of Facebook. People do care about privacy, but will only act on it if there is a reasonably convenient alternative - if Diaspora can make itself convenient, I think it has a chance.

Also, add in a slow news week with some sensationalized mainstream stories about privacy that mention Diaspora, and I think the odds increase even more. People love to have something to be paranoid about with their friends.

I think it's worth noting that most of those stories are random blog sites, which are kind of allowed (expected?) to post stupid, sensationalist stuff fairly regularly. The WIRED article was a cover story on a major technology publication, and went beyond opinion and used a totally misleading graph ( http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.ht... ). The WIRED article is a few levels above those links in terms of stupidity.

Agreed

This relates to an economic principle called Price Elasticity. The Wikipedia article is pretty informative on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

What you've done is some basic "elasticity testing", which, in the "real world" can often be difficult or impractical, but lends itself particularly well to online transactions of relatively small dollar amounts. More people selling small services online should be doing this - traditional businesses would love the luxury of doing it so easily.

You didn't really ask this, but here goes... Do you really want to sell your company before it's out of private beta? If your product (and yourself as an employee) are worth six figures now, what is the likelihood that will decrease after general availability? That is an actual question though, not rhetorical.

If you're not confident in continuing to increase the value, you may want to cash out now... But you're only alive and productive for so many years, and developing a product people are interested in isn't something you can just turn around and do again automatically. I think if it were me, I'd probably hold out and keep rolling the dice if I felt they were loaded in my favor :)

IPO's are down all across the market, and I don't think it's just because the market is tough. With all of the regulations (Sarbanes Oxley, etc.) and liability (SEC Investigations) associated with being a public company, there are significant downsides to anyone hoping to run a streamlined, efficient business model - it is especially tough for fast moving technology companies.

We sold a prior company of ours to a public entity and stayed on board for a few years, and the red tape / liability overhead and constant short-term goal focus it forced us into was enough to get us to move on to other projects. Being a public company sucks. I think that's one big driver behind all of these private equity firms with multiple billions of dollars to spend. I hope the trend continues.

I think responsible economic action is very popular with the population of California in general. Unfortunately, the general population of a given state doesn't get involved in local elections (what's the name of your local state delegate?) unless they work for the government they're voting in. Therefore even though the population in general might be howling for reform, the state delegates that have to push it through have no incentive to, since they know the great majority of people that actually know who they are and are going to vote in the next election, are against reform.

Everyone who buys California state bonds (which are income tax exempt) is loaning the money. The interest rate California has had to pay to entice people to buy these increasingly riskier bonds, has increased accordingly as the state's financial condition has deteriorated. It is a risky deal, and buying CA state bonds to hold until maturity is basically a bet that the state will get bailed out by the federal government.