I’ve always been interested in starting companies. Ten years ago I was an undergrad at Penn State. I was told by professors, my parents & the press that the best way to start a company was to go to graduate school, become an expert in your field and start a company with a classmate. [...]
Posts under ‘Uncategorized’
Sincerely Inc. My new startup!
I’m extremely excited to announce my new company Sincerely today. We are focused on making it easy to send real physical photos from your mobile phone. Simple vision. Huge market.
I’m very excited to be working on this company with former YC classmate and Xobni teammate Bryan Kennedy. I’m also blessed to be [...]
Startup Success Demands Close Collaboration – Revisited 3.5 years later
I originally published the following blog post on the Xobni company blog on September 18, 2006.
That was over 3 and half years ago. Xobni was still based in Cambridge, MA, my cofounder and I were still living on hot pockets and chips ahoy cookies, and we were sharing a bedroom in a friend’s [...]
Freemium ain’t new. It is just a new word.
I recently spoke at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco. The speaker line-up was full of great companies executing on freemium models in the consumer and enterprise space: companies like Dropbox, Automattic, and MailChimp. I was asked to speak as part of the Freemium for Enterprise portion of the program.
Below are my slides from the [...]
The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye
To the outsider it may appear that 100% of Xobni’s engineering effort is focused on the development of our Outlook plugin. Surprisingly, this is far from true. Anybody who has operated a software company will tell you there is a lot of engineering effort required to turn a product into a business: billing infrastructure, bug [...]
Our 3rd Revenue Line in 4 months
I had to write about tonight’s announcement because it is a little bit nostalgic for me – tonight we launched our Salesforce extension, which is a premium service that connects Xobni (and Outlook) to Salesforce.com
I’m proud of the team for launching three business models in the last 4 months (if you didn’t see the other [...]