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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 [...]

Social Networks, The Monkey Sphere, and Moore’s Law of Human Relationships

Just before Christmas I did an interview with the SF Chronicle for an article titled  Year in Review: Social networks come of age by Benny Evangalista.  Benny and I had a conversation about social networks and how far they have come. In the article he conjectures that social networks are here to stay, as is [...]

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 [...]