Nick Bradbury put up a post earlier this week about FeedDemon going to a subscription model. FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator several months ago and – as part of NewsGator’s effort to “normalize” (and simplify) our product sales approach, we started the process of shifting FeedDemon to subscription pricing to match up with NewsGator’s pricing model. This was in advance of a point release of FeedDemon (1.6) which will have the NewsGator synchronization engine fully integrated along with a other features.
None of us expected 100 comments within 48 hours. A few clear themes emerged from the comments. A group of us, including me, Nick, Greg, and JB, had several long conversations over the past few days to both synthesize the comments as well as figure out the most effective and user-responsive approach going forward.
The result was a significant change in the way FeedDemon will work if someone’s subscription runs out – most notably – the software will continue to work, just with some of the subscription-oriented features disabled. We also sharpened our thinking and point of view on the separation in the extended NewsGator product line between the software components and the service components. Fortunately, we have plenty of models to build on (e.g. Symantec, McAfee) so we aren’t reinventing anything; however, we made progress getting clarity around how this works across all of our products.
The feedback to Nick’s second announcement has been uniformally positive. It’s great to have users that have strong points of view, even when they are different (or of a much greater magnitude) than what you expected. As a result of Nick’s blog, we were able to engage in a rapid, very public, and constructive feedback loop. Assuming we are successful listeners, I’d hope this will lead to even better solutions for our customers.
Of course, there are several interesting sociological things at play here. Historically, if users didn’t like what a manufacture of a product was doing (even if they loved the product), they were usually limited to one of two choices: (a) suck it up and live with it or (b) stop using the products. The tempo and dynamics of blogging clearly has impact on these communication patterns in new and exciting ways, which will logically impact how products get created and evolve – hopefully to incorporate even more user feedback.
New West Network just started up an Aspen-based blog. If you are a fan of Aspen (and I know a bunch of you New Yorkers out there are because I can’t manage to get a reservation in any of the good restaurants there at Christmas-time without pulling strings), take a look. Aspen joins the other New West sites for Missoula, Boulder, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque / Santa Fe, and Northern Idaho. There’s nothing up for Homer Alaska yet, but maybe I can convince Jonathan to come visit.
I woke up one day (yesterday) and all of a sudden I’m using Skype all the time (including SkypeOut). What changed? First, I’m at my house in Alaska and my habits got shaken up. Second, I installed my Vonage phone so I could have a 303 area code while I’m up here (and just to play around with Vonage) so I decided that while I was at it, I should try Skype as a phone and see how it compared. But – most importantly – the Skype for Outlook plug-in hit beta.
Holy shit – this is cool. It works exactly as you’d want it to. I hate talking on the phone, but it’s a side effect of being a VC. I live in two apps – Outlook (on the left monitor) and Firefox (on the right monitor). Suddenly I’ve got a little magic toolbar that lets me call people via Skype by looking up their info in Outlook. Perfect. And – it works. $12 from Paypal (10 euros) and I’m set with long distance for a long time.
Now – all I need is a headset with a microphone that integrates with my fancy speakers.
My friends Don and Christine Springer went bear watching today (I stayed home and worked – Brad is a dull boy.) They took a float plane from Smokey Bear Air in Homer to the Alaska Homestead Lodge (45 minutes away). We did the trip last year and had a great time with the hosts – James and Shelia Isaak. Pictures follow:
The Flight
Real Alaska Mountains
The Bear (Yes – It’s Close)
Greg Reinacker has a comprehensive post up about why NewsGator has shifted to subscription pricing for all of their products (except the soon to be released NewsGator Enterprise Server.) If you are a software entrepreneur thinking about “subscription” vs. “perpetual” pricing, it’s worth reading this post. I’ve watched a number of my companies work through this – most end up either with subscription (e.g. Commerce5, Oxlo, Quova, Rally) or perpetual (Klocwork, Newmerix) but some end up with both (StillSecure).
Make sure you separate concept of the way you sell your software (subscription vs. perpetual) from the way you deliver your software (ASP / hosted vs. “shrink wrap” – remember when Apple II and TRS-80 software came in ziplock bags). I find that – even today – lots of folks that I talk to get tangled up in the difference between these two constructs.
Jason and I are feeling the need for closure on our term sheet series as we’ve started gearing up on our next series (M&A). So – we’re going to knock out the balance of the standard term sheet terms this week. We’re still in the “terms that don’t matter much zone” so we’re including Voting Rights and Employee Pool for completeness.
“Voting Rights: The Series A Preferred will vote together with the Common Stock and not as a separate class except as specifically provided herein or as otherwise required by law. The Common Stock may be increased or decreased by the vote of holders of a majority of the Common Stock and Series A Preferred voting together on an as if converted basis, and without a separate class vote. Each share of Series A Preferred shall have a number of votes equal to the number of shares of Common Stock then issuable upon conversion of such share of Series A Preferred.”
Most of the time voting rights are simply an “FYI” section as all the heavy rights are contained in other sections such as the protective provisions.
“Employee Pool: Prior to the Closing, the Company will reserve shares of its Common Stock so that __% of its fully diluted capital stock following the issuance of its Series A Preferred is available for future issuances to directors, officers, employees and consultants. The term “Employee Pool” shall include both shares reserved for issuance as stated above, as well as current options outstanding, which aggregate amount is approximately __% of the Company’s fully diluted capital stock following the issuance of its Series A Preferred.”
The employee pool section is a separate section in order to clarify the capital structure and specifically call out the percentage of the company that will be allocated to the option pool associated with the financing. Since a cap table is almost always included with the term sheet, this section is redundant, but exists so there is no confusion about the size of the option pool.
I’m lucky. I get to live in two beautiful places: Homer, AK and Eldorado Springs, CO (I like to say I live in Boulder because people know where it is, but we actually live in Eldo.) We live in Alaska part of the year because I have to get away from the hustle and bustle of Eldo / Boulder to think straight.
In addition to our nation’s 229th birthday, it was Eldorado Springs’ 100th birthday today. I’ll get back to writing about serious stuff like venture capital, but for now, happy birthday Eldo.
Fred Wilson clued me into a fun use of del.icio.us. He calls it the “for:“ tag. He set one up for his wife Joanne (Gotham Gal). Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he simply tags it “for:gothamgal”.
I just set up a for:bradfeld tag in del.icio.us. Then – I subscribed to it in NewsGator. If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.
I stumbled over Edward Tufte’s Sparklines this morning. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite books and his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint helped shape my point of view that PowerPoint is contributing to the intellectual degredation of contemporary society.
Sparklines are an awesome new way to display high densities of quantitative information. Tufte nailed it once again – hopefully we’ll start seeing these pop up all over the place. Fortunately there’s already a PHP Graphing Library up at Sourceforge and O’Reilly’s xml.com site has a good article with Python code up.