Disqus - Latest Comments for MicahWedemeyer

Re: Wensing, M.

MicahWedemeyer — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 08:22:03 -0000

A counter-example to the "more space" analogy is Flickr. I have no idea how profitable they are, but the overall model seems dubious to me.

On the free side, I'm sure they have plenty of users who hit the free limit and just leave, preferring Facebook or someone else. But Flickr doesn't just delete their images, so Flickr ends up paying to store lots of users who will never convert.

On the premium side, unlimited space and higher quality images really caters to power users who (I would guess) use a LOT of space and bandwidth. With Flickr collecting $2/month, I can easily see plenty of premium users ultimately costing Flickr money.

An ideal scenario is where your "more space" premium offering is just more rows in a database, like "add additional users" or "track more customers". If the offering involves costly resources like storage or bandwidth, be careful to price your product such that your premium users don't destroy your margins.

Re: Considering Y Combinator (or any seed funding)?

MicahWedemeyer — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:37:41 -0000

I'm proud to count myself as a "lifestyle entrepreneur" these days. I once dreamed of VC funding and those sort of things, but now all I want is to work on what I like. My chances of getting rich are pretty low, but my chances of permanently saying goodbye to the average work world are looking better every day.

Re: Considering Y Combinator (or any seed funding)?

MicahWedemeyer — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:19:19 -0000

I'm the guy who runs the D&D management website - http://www.obsidianportal.com. Like you say, we actually did find a business in this area and we've bootstrapped ourselves into a good spot.

We may not change the world, but we've definitely change the RPG world. That's enough for me :)

Re: Entrepreneur’s Dilemma – Product or Service

MicahWedemeyer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:51:42 -0000

I am in the process of making the jump myself. My startup(s) are slowly growing, and it's gotten to the point where I am quitting my day job to focus on them. However, since I still need the cash flow, I'm looking to pick up a part time contract to keep me afloat while I nurse my projects to profitability.

Thanks for the encouragement!

Re: Atlanta Startups That Didn’t Survive

MicahWedemeyer — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:41:54 -0000

Thanks for being honest and sharing the suffering. All we hear about is the 1% who make it big, and they rewrite the story to make it sound like it was easy. It's not easy.

Also, I was glad to hear that "fail fast" involved a multi-year timespan in the case of Blue Violin. A lot of people think "fast" means 6 or 9 months. It's completely unreasonable to think that a company will be successful in that span of time. If you throw in the towel that quickly, you'll be failing fast forever and never have a chance of actually succeeding.

My one complaint is that you talked about seeking investors at about 5 minutes in on the video, then about 15 minutes in explained that you were bootstrapped for the most part. I think that there are a lot more people who talk about investment than there are people who have actually dealt with it. Most new web entrepreneurs should be ready to bootstrap their project 100% and finance it either with personal savings or income from another job. If you're depending on outside investors, you're probably sunk from the get-go.

Re: Send Paul Stamatiou to BlogWorld ‘09!

MicahWedemeyer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:56:40 -0000

Hmm, Disqus won't let me reply to Paul, so it looks like I'm talking to myself...but...

$143/mo sounds pretty good from what I understand of getting private insurance all on your own. Is it a high-deductible plan, or does it have a decent co-pay for office visits and such? What kind of support is there for entrepreneurs and startups for getting a decent rate? I've always thought decent health coverage has been glossed over in the whole "quit your job to do a startup!" community. It's one thing for a company to fail due to a bad idea or bad execution. It's something entirely different for it to fail because you get sick or have an accident. That's why I think public healthcare would be a huge boon to entrepreneurs.

Anyways, Obsidian Portal and DoLeaf are both taking up a lot of my time, but aside from random support requests, OP pretty much runs itself these days. It generates a nice side income, but definitely not enough to call it ramen profitable yet. There are a lot of features I want to add, so I work on it when I can spare time from DoLeaf, which is pretty much never.

Re: Send Paul Stamatiou to BlogWorld ‘09!

MicahWedemeyer — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:36:15 -0000

Yeah, I kind of have to agree. Part of being a startup founder involves forgoing some of the nice benefits that having a steady income would provide, like going to conventions, owning a nice car, and unfortunately, having health coverage. Now, if it was "chip in so Paul can buy health insurance" then I might be more inclined to open my wallet.

Re: Stupid WTF! ActionView::MissingTemplate Exception: Missing template users/_user.erb

MicahWedemeyer — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:32:29 -0000

You can also add the extensions of the partial to force it to render the html one:

render_to_string(:partial => 'users/user.html.erb')

Re: Built For Speed: Using Amazon CloudFront To Serve Assets - Intridea Company Blog

MicahWedemeyer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:22:02 -0000

I wrote up instructions for using CloudFront with attachment_fu. It would be great if you would link to it for the folks that are on a_fu instead of paperclip. It's seriously a 5 minute setup for people that are already using a_fu with S3.

http://blog.aisleten.com/20...

Re: What Grade Do YOU Give Obama?

MicahWedemeyer — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:33:53 -0000

I love how everyone is using these comments to grade Obama. Use the facebook app, people! That's what it's for!

Re: DoLeaf

MicahWedemeyer — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:16:25 -0000

The guarantee / return policy is something we've punted on for now. Every seller has a different one, and we need to decide if we'll allow them to keep their own (easier for sellers, more confusing for buyers) or try to force them to go along with a sitewide policy. Perhaps we'll do a little of both, where they can have their own policies, but can also sign up for a sitewide policy. Sellers who honor the sitewide one will get a special icon or badge that makes this clear.

Thanks for the color / design ideas, too!

Re: DoLeaf

MicahWedemeyer — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:13:53 -0000

Hmm, good point about "our version" of what those terms mean. I can remember being fairly new and getting so frustrated at the phrase "medium sun" I guess I still get irritated at that.

So an FAQ or quick-lookup of terminology makes sense. I'll put it on the list. The hard part will be integrating it in a quick and easy way without cluttering things up. Guess that's always the hard part.

Re: DoLeaf

MicahWedemeyer — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:11:28 -0000

Yeah, we'd like to offer howto guides, help with planning, and all sorts of before and after you buy info. But, at this stage, we're just trying to get the sellers interested and get some plants listed.

Thanks for the feedback, especially the tips about the empty categories. I'll bring that up with the team.

Re: Built to Fail: How companies like Google, IDEO, and 37signals build failure-tolerant systems for anything!

MicahWedemeyer — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:45:16 -0000

A little on the harsh, but I agree. Give yourself a little time to see if you're on the right track. Real success takes years, not a couple days.

Re: DoLeaf

MicahWedemeyer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:56:11 -0000

I'll try to answer each in turn:

Overlay Icons - Most of these are (usually) instantly recognizable to anyone who purchases plants. If you go to Home Depot and grab a plant, you'll see that they all have a tag with some basic info like light preference and cold tolerance. It's the basic stats of the plant. We know they're not 100% intuitive, but they make sense to our target audience (we hope). Specifically on growth rate, it's very relative and subjective, but most people with a little gardening experience learn what it means. Fast = gets big quick, will fill out to its max height/width, then you spend all your time pruning it. Slow = will take a long time to grow, but when it's adult size you'll be the envy of all your gardening buddies. Also, for shipping form, it applies to how the plant will arrive. This could be: bare root (plant with roots, dirt has been brushed off, roots are wrapped with wet newspaper), potted (comes with roots in soil in a pot), bulb (small ball that you bury), or seed. Again, it's terminology that we hope is well known by our audience.

Location based searching - Yes, this is very important. We hope to make it easy to find plants that will not only grow in your area, but also were grown nearby. We want to weight the search results to automatically display things from local nurseries in order to reduce shipping time and also increase the chance of getting a plant that's already acclimated to the buyer's climate.

Buying online - We're worried that this will be a big hurdle. I think a lot of people will be scared to buy plants online for the reasons you mention. We bought a tree online and have been ecstatic with the results. I hope we can convince others that it's a great way to get stuff.

Nursery names - We want to be clear that we (DoLeaf) are just a marketplace and not a nursery. We want the nurseries to get the main recognition and provide them with an opportunity to brand their storefronts.

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: How to fund your startup from customers

MicahWedemeyer — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:39:25 -0000

I'm choosing option 2. I quit going to a lot of the Atlanta startup events because I realized I was expecting someone to just up and write me a check. Instead, I just spend that time at home, at my desk, working on my startup.

Re: git ready » what git is not

MicahWedemeyer — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:32:39 -0000

I can't not disagree with you more. I also was hoping for a more balanced review of the downsides of git. And yes, there are downsides.

Re: git ready » what git is not

MicahWedemeyer — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:31:29 -0000

Add this to the list above please: git is not a religious experience

It's a nice tool, but not the 2nd coming of Christ.