oneye

Chances are that your company or your industry will be commoditized especially when you don’t think it can happen because, in reality commoditization always happens

Everything else in the post rests on this, and I'm not sure that its true. Do you have research or statistics to support this claim?

I'm curious what these industries are. Oil? Investment funds? Pharmaceuticals?

I'm thinking that there are a few industries where commoditization has not happened over the last few hundred years. Of these, I'm curious how many of the industries commoditization could happen in, but has not, and how many (for some reason) are strongly resistant to commoditization.

I have no idea. I (as I said) was not trying to assert that DuckDuckGo is not compromised, I was asserting that the reason that people believe it to be secure is because they've differentiated on privacy since the beginning.

Mostly, I don't like seeing condescending, inaccurate statements.

Or because their entire business differentiation from the beginning has been privacy.

This does not mean that it is not compromised, of course. But its why people would believe it isn't compromised. And its a much better reason than your sarcastic imitation.

Visit EE classes and study areas at your local universities.

Bump your prices up.

Imagine if some senior design guy in some digital agency making 8 figures in profit per year wants to use it. Do you think that he wouldn't get approval for, say, $500 / month if he thought it would help him work with the designers he manages or the stakeholders he reports to?

Capping out at $99 / month is leaving a ton of potential money on the table, IMO.

If you think that $19 / month is over-priced, you are not in anybody's market.

If you think that the service is not as good as your current solutions, that is a different critique and discussion altogether.

I would actually advise to get rid of the $19/month option, because as all of the successful SaaS operators say it will result in the unhappiest customers and the lowest profit margin.

Thank you for sharing this. I've been working and listening hard and anything that clears up conversion tactics (especially when just handed to me) is gold.

Cheers.

Supporting the old software engineering folklore that the earlier a bug is introduced (and the later it is found) the harder and more expensive it is to fix.

I wouldn't call it folklore as there are numerous studies supporting it.

EDIT: I decided to crack open Code Complete for anyone who is interested [1].

[1] "Researchers at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, TRW and other organizations have found that purging an error by the beginning of construction allows rework to be done 10 to 100 times less expensively than when it's done in the last part of the process, during system test or after release (Fagan 1976; Humphrey, Snyder, and Willis 1991; Willis et al. 1998; Grady 1999; Shull et al. 2002; Boehm and Turner 2004)".

I completely missed that. Thank you!

The short answer is yes. But, its possible I'd not be interested in selling if growth was fast enough that in 1-2 years the company would be worth 10x what it is worth at the time of the offer. So, is 1-2 years of my time worth that? It depends on how enjoyable the work is.

> A real-time, node-based video effects compositor for the web built with HTML5, Javascript and WebGL

I for one am really impressed. While I'm not up to date with node.js, WebGL (or even HTML5 tbh), the boundaries that people keep pushing with web technologies is pretty wild.

EDIT: Reading more, I'm not sure if I am proud or embarrassed about my narrow focus over the last few years. I'm proud that I'm making a good living due to it, but disappointed that I haven't been able play with these things. Reading about WebGL [1], I feel like there is a new world to explore (for web programming).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webgl