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Justin and Jason speak with Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe – a web and mobile productivity application, about how he was able to bootstrap a “scratch your own itch” side project into a successful startup that employs a dozen people and services tens of thousands of paying customers.
After listening to about 2 dozen of these podcasts, I just realized that I had the two of you mixed up. I always thought the deeper voice & accent was coming from Jason. So funny.
Such a great episode, I’m so glad someone recommend you to interview Michael.
One thing I took away from this is the reinforcement of my belief that you really can go a long way just throwing hardware at scaling issues. 100,000 users on a single virtual server just shows how far you can go, and ties in with Stackoverflow running on a single monster DB server.
@Udi Mosayev – You can thank fellow listener Alex Aguilar for the recommendation. I had never heard of Nozbe before, so it was a great find.
Justin : Do you have any information online, or can you recommend a resources, about running a mastermind group. A buddy and I are thinking about forming one to help us progress our projects.
We are planning to include just the two of us for a few meetings than get more people. I am interested in what sort of agenda / rules people use for mastermind groups, since I am sure out meetings could easily devolve into a general “shooting the shit” discussion.
Thanks
Sam
I really enjoyed the interview with Michael. A few take-aways from the show:
– Follow Amy Hoy’s “anthropology” / research approach by analyzing / dissecting unsolved problems on forums
– Leverage an existing forum or user base to announce the product you create (since it solves an unresolved problem discussed there)
– Create a campaign to incentivize existing users to upgrade to the premium option (also consider other channels like subscribe via the mobile version)
– Charge immediately for the premium option but offer 60-day unconditional refund
– Focus on revenue growth not on customer pool growth
I couldn’t help notice that one of the catalyst was that one of the ZDNet writers picked up his announcement early on. 😉
Great show!
@Philippe Monnet – Thanks for the recap! It’s always useful to have that I think.
@Sam – I don’t we just threw ours together…
Excellent episode!
Great find with Nozbe. As a GTD fan after using it for few days I find it extremely useful.
Best thing about it is chrome extension that jumps up on you with the “first next action” every time you click on new tab – such a great way to stop procrastination!
Another is ease of adding new action – one entry field at middle of screen.
Google proved it, Nozbe did it perfectly – only thing for me now is to convince my best man (who is developing apps with me) that our next endeavor should have interface like that 😉
ps. I have a question for you guys. Michael said that monthly fee is “2 cops of coffee”, and I agree that it is OK price point, and I would be glad to pay it.
But… Problem is that where I live 10$ is 10 coffees…
I guess people in developed countries wouldn’t pay it if it were 50$ ?
Do you think online subscription businesses could get additional revenue from lower priced markets ?
Would a price like 2$/month provide additional hundreds of thousands of users or not ?