He was one of my favorite guests. I'd interviewed much more famous entrepreneurs than Fabrice, but the episode with him was one of my most popular because he was by far the most candid -- even telling me his net worth at every stage of his career.
There are risks to building in house too:
Things will break over time
Key programmer leaves, no good documentation or succession plan left behind
New needs will arise (e.g. if you built an expense tracking app before smartphones, you'll now need to build a iPhone/Android app)
Maintaining security - is your security team really better than the outsourced service's?
API support
Developer ecosystem
There's always a build vs. buy decision and sometimes you should build, but this is why even huge companies use Salesforce over maintaining an internal CRM.
We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product.
Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but if you know of one please send them our way! http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/
And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes.
I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. At <30 people, all you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
> IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.
Not to mention there's a lot of SysAdmins out there that will do the job very well for a lot less than $60K a year. You don't need to hire a SysAdmin who used to work on Google sized infrastructure to run your internal startup's IT.
Salary is just a part of the total cost of an employee. You have to take into account: recruiting, office space, food, medical insurance, payroll tax, stock options, etc. Usually these things will be equivalent to the salary.
A lot of companies end up going with something similar to this, since Github Enterprise costs get a little crazy. Stash is good, but if one is looking for an even lower cost option, a lot of people recommend Gitlab now-days.
However for some, the task of self-hosting is daunting. I presume that is why some are willing to pay a lot for a hosted solution.
BTW -- It's worth noting -- BitBucket is run by Atlassian and allows unlimited free private repos. I think you must pay for teams (EDIT: Free up to 5 users, $10 per month for 10 users, etc, it's basically $1 per user per month over the initial 5 free), but just throwing that out there. It's basically their hosted Stash solution.
Plus the hidden cost of setting it up. Example: Backing up Stash - while being relatively straight-forward - comes with some amount of scripting and testing (you do test your backup, do you?).
Not saying Stash is bad (the contrary), but when evaluating cost, evaluate all cost.
Github is really attractive with all the services that integrate into it. A service at $100/mo isn't much when you consider any labor time it saves ($50-$150/hour generally)
... and Stash is really attractive with all the local plugins that integrate with it, and allow you to do things that are really hard when you're stuck with web hooks.
Local installations don't cost hours-a-month to run.
And if you still don't believe us on press releases, read the article I wrote for the PRSA that questions the press release's value, and debunks that it will help with SEO or social: http://comprehension.prsa.org/?p=6202
What's your goal for the press? To get users? Investors? Customers?
For a tech blog like you describe, don't bother with a press release. Best to send a short email describing why what you're doing is interesting. Most reporters prefer hearing from founders rather than PR people.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I had the feeling that a full press release could have been seen as pretentious. We are focused on creating a useful product and we are not interested in getting coverage just for the sake of it. Much better, as you say, to send a personal email from the founders to these blogs. Thanks again!
Journalists are like anyone else: They wake up in the morning wanting to do their job well and write about stories that will be interesting to their audience. If you do your research and pitch them a story that's interesting and up their alley they'll appreciate it. If you spam them they'll ignore it.
Find reporters who cover your beat using http://muckrack.com (full disclosure: my company made that site), follow them on Twitter, see what they like to write about, and start building a relationship by tweets or email based on what they're interested in.
There's no standard for the email to journalists, but just keep them short and immediately say why your web app would be interesting to their readers.
Love this service. I've used it for years on all my sites, great to know if you have a traffic serge before Google Analytics catches up. Amazing UI too. Receives far too little buzz for how great of product it is.
Well said Ramit. There was a great interview of Jeff Bezos by the now defunct Portfolio Magazine in which they asked him how important A/B testing is to Amazon's success. He said it was important but that still many decisions, such as launching the Kindle, need to "come from the heart".
In this age of analytics, I think a lot of small startups are overlooking the gut decisions they need to make and focusing too much on optimization (e.g. this HN question).
This might not be the interview referenced above (kinda brief). Wired acquired Portfolio's content? Or was it their progeny?
"Portfolio: Are you always extremely methodical about major decisions?
Bezos: With business decisions, yes. With personal decisions, I find that my methodical nature can confuse me, and so I think more about personal decisions, like what job you really want to take or whom you want to marry. Although I did have criteria for that...
Portfolio: What's a gut call you made?
Bezos: Amazon Prime. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, $79, that gives you free two-day shipping on everything you buy for a year. When you do the math on that, it always tells you not to do it.
Portfolio: One of your big initiatives, a search engine called A9, fell flat. What happened?
Bezos: If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at."
Kickstarter's had a very impressive rise prior to Diaspora. They had over a quarter million UVs in March according to compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/kickstarter.com/), up 100% over the prior month. With a quick look at the site to can see lots of ~$10k project are getting funded all the time. That's revolutionary.
In my original post, I acknowledged Fundable had bigger problems:
Now it’s important not to overlook all the other things that might have caused one business to succeed where another failed. If you google “Fundable” you’ll see they made a number of execution missteps. Fundable also didn’t have the advantage of launching in a time when high quality video creation is so easy and sharing is so powerful over platforms such as Twitter and, well, Facebook. Nevertheless, it’s great to see a venture that’s executed well and in Kickstarter’s case its competency certainly extends to its design.
He was one of my favorite guests. I'd interviewed much more famous entrepreneurs than Fabrice, but the episode with him was one of my most popular because he was by far the most candid -- even telling me his net worth at every stage of his career.