When you or your company receive press, something too good to be true happens: you feel a sudden inflow of success and accomplishment, people compliment you for the writeup you received, and everything feels great. Problem is, you start to get lazy. You settle into this comfortable feeling of accomplishment, when in reality, not a single thing has changed before and after the press you received.

A few days ago, TechCrunch broke the news that inDinero raised $1M from angel investors. I thought it'd be cool to share, but it never struck me as a big deal. Raising money is possibly the most boring part of working on a startup, so if anything, I wanted to be done with it. What happened next was interesting: dozens of my friends and acquaintances sent me congratulatory emails and facebook wall posts, and the moment felt like I was being congratulated for giving birth or doing something actually monumental. Raising money, in my opinion, is the least monumental thing that can happen to ones company. But it sure is press-worthy! While friends give me pats on the back, Paul Graham from Y Combinator tells me "Now you just have to not screw it up!" It's like what a good asian parent would say; just because you got As in school doesn't mean you'll actually succeed in life. I sense that a lot of first-time entrepreneurs get too much pre-mature press (because it's so easy to get), only to have it prevent them from doing what's best for their newfound businesses.

To prevent having this problem myself, I've conditioned myself to get more antsy after getting any congratulatory letter. I translate "congratulations" into "don't f*ck it up", and it puts me in this ideal place in mind where I feel good about having accomplished a very limited milestone, but understand that it doesn't actually mean anything as far the big picture is concerned. I highly recommend other first-time entrepreneurs do the same. Press is great, but in reality, nothing has changed since your writeup. Now back to building product.

I'm in the final weeks of Y Combinator, and the summer has been an incredible learning experience. Through the process, I've learned how to be a better coder, better designer, better marketer, better deal-maker, and an all around better person. But the one thing that made the biggest difference was just having more self-confidence in what I think is right instead of just listening to the advice of grown ups. As Paul Bucheit said at Angel Conf, a good founder may hear lots of conflicting advice and ultimately say to oneself "no, I actually think I'm right."

And this summer, I can honestly say that I've finally acquired that ability to say "no, I actually think I'm right". Without self confidence...

1 - inDinero would be competing head-on with QuickBooks, trying to replace it as the premiere accounting system. Ends up that nobody likes accounting software, and I'd go insane working on a product that I didn't love. Multiple successful founders urged us to go in this direction while we were still building out our product, because they couldn't understand why someone would want to use a dumbed-down finance product. And it's pretty difficult to speculate what customers will and won't like before you build the product, so we decided to take the lean startup approach and release the first crappy product that we were able to build. Can you imagine inDinero being an accounting solution?

2 - inDinero would be focussing on marketing and user acquisition before finding happy, passionate customers. In hindsight, that would have been a huge mistake, but it was hard to tell at first if the bigger problem was marketing, or if it was product. Only after you find happy and passionate *paying* customers do you realize how bad your product was before. When starting the company, people would often tell us how great our product team was, but how none of us had a background in sales/marketing, and that we should focus on that. But since I think 100X more about my business than any potential investor does, I can quickly tell that businesses that think they have a marketing problem actually have a product problem. And our friends at FreshBooks.com reassured me that they just focussed on making the product great long before thinking about user acquisition, and it's served them well. And I respect that, because FreshBooks is one of few companies in our space who "gets it".

3 - inDinero would be raising money at a significantly lower valuation than what is actually market-rate for the company. Grown-ups typically advise young entrepreneurs to settle on what will clearly be a fair deal, and my personal opinion is that fund-raising should be the first test to train your deal-making abilities. Settling at a "fair" valuation doesn't make any sense, especially for a founder who's trying to hone their negotiation skills. I spent a decent amount of time studying negotiation from books like Bargaining for Advantage, and it made me realize that honing these skills during the busiest weeks of the Y Combinator program won't be smart in the short term, but will ultimately be crucial if my goal in life is to be a world-class CEO. Therefore, I've ignored pretty much all advice on settling for a "lower than market-rate" valuation. The consequence: slightly less demand from investors, but a drastically higher price and significantly better outcome for the company.

If you're a first-time entrepreneur, be mindful that you'll have world-class entrepreneurs telling you what seems to be good advice. They'll assert with confidence why their advice is the best advice, but in the end, you need to decide what the actual right thing to do is. Listen to your instincts and never be afraid to tell yourself "no, I actually think I'm right."

Since going fulltime on my startup inDinero.com, things have been crazy to say the least. Many of you probably noticed that we just launched on TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, WebWorkerDaily, and various other blogs on Friday July 2nd. And since launch, business has been even more exciting! I haven't talked much about inDinero in the past because I didn't think I had much valuable information to share with others. But I learned a lot from the launching experience, and it made me better understand lean startup principles: how to build a startup with very little money, and with very little time to experiment with ideas. Room for failure is super low because there's only so much time you have before running out of cash. Here are some things we did and why they worked for us: 1) We built vaporware, and lots of it. I recently wrote that advertising a feature before actually building it should be highly encouraged while building a startup. For example, on inDinero, we would supposedly allow people to integrate data from web applications such as Freshbooks and Shoeboxed. (screenshots below) - but if they wanted to use the functionality, we would instead send them to a page that told them the feature was coming soon. As a result of that, we quickly figured out what our users wanted us to build. And dozens of people would email me asking for Freshbooks and Shoeboxed integration, and others would even suggest Quickbooks Online integration. Nobody was upset that we advertised vaporware. :) 2) Making real money. I'll admit that I was scared that introducing a free plan would divert attention away from the paid plans, but people continue to upgrade everyday. I was also scared that our pricing structure wouldn't be right out of the gate, but ends up that it doesn't matter too much - it's a continuously iterative process, and we're still trying to figure out what fair and ideal pricing looks like. One thing that's definitely helped us was publishing a phone number on the plans pages. When people are uncertain, they want to know that humans are around - so we've answered peoples' questions on pricing, learned about our users' needs, and even got customer testimonials just from offering a phone number. As Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com says, great customer support (and especially great phone support) is a fantastic way to get users to evangelize and love you. 3) Continuous Iteration. This is just the start of inDinero. I have no clue where we'll be in a few months from now, and it's hard for me to even know what the product will look like in four weeks from now. But I'd highly stress launching sooner rather than later, even if your bugs aren't fully fleshed out, because you'll realize what the actual top priorities should be. At inDinero, we hesitated launching on the basis that our screws weren't bolted in tight enough. But it ended up that after launching, none of our users cared about the problems we would have spent our time working on. If you're asking yourself the question "are we ready to launch yet or should we continue solidifying product?", I'd probably lean towards launching. You'll know exactly what's wrong with the product, you'll get emails from hundreds of people excited to use your product, and it'll give you enough adrenaline to continue during times good and bad. Curious with where inDinero is going in the next few weeks? Read my blog post called "inDinero's Vision for August".

As my final semester of college comes to a close, I've been training one of my classmates to help organize the computer science events here at Berkeley - and as an engineer, he hates the idea of promoting events that don't exist. "It's total vaporware!" Yes, it's vaporware, because we're advertising an event that doesn't actually exist. But by selling vaporware, you quickly figure out if something is worthy of spending your time on. Last summer when Andy and I started our company, we just put up a crappy webpage that told people what our product did. And of course, we didn't have a product. So people would try to sign up, only to find a form where they could leave their email address. This was important for three reasons: 1 - we immediately knew that our problem was worthy of solving. 2 - we got instant feedback from people telling us what they wanted to see from our product. 3 - it gave us the motivation to push forward. In fact, I've taken this to the next extreme: my focus is on the vaporware itself, since it solves the problem of not knowing what to build. Engineers are terrible when it comes to solving problems that don't exist, and I knew that my co-founder and I had a similar risk. I now spend about 50% of my time figuring out what needs to be solved (by fixing the website, validating screenshots of our vaporware), and 50% of my time on building the product that has so far been vaporware. This works in many arenas of life - for the CSUA (computer science undergraduate association) here at Berkeley, we're co-hosting the annual "Engineering Demo Day". Which means we had to find a) a lot of engineering demos, b) sponsors for the event, c) people to attend. To take my focus on vaporware to the extreme, we signed up dozens of demos and secured out sponsors before even finding a venue, because none of the logistics would have mattered if there was no demand in the first place. We set up a facebook event advertising the event to see if anyone would RSVP. This took less than an hour of our time. My CS friends hate the idea of selling vaporware (and in this case promoting an event that doesn't yet exist), because it's "morally questionable", but I don't think so at all. Let's say that Demo Day had no demand. We'd tell the demoing teams that the event is off, and we'd tell our sponsors they could keep their money. No problem, at all. Let's say inDinero had no demand in its first product. What if I told you that it didn't have much demand? Truth is, we didn't get any compliments until I redid the website for the third time. And through each iteration of the user-facing website, I learned of what prospective customers wanted, I figured out what our website didn't advertise, and I had a much better idea of what people were looking for in a finance product. And all of this knowledge came from my selling vaporware. The bottom line: Vaporware is good because 1) it'll save you time and money, 2) it's a completely legitimate method of doing customer development, and 3) You'll learn so much about your product without even having to build a prototype.

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to come up with business ideas. I basically said to look at the world with a critical eye, and to keep track of everything that seems to suck. I still maintain that philosophy, and I recently discovered something about my "passions" in life: Everything I aspire to do is directly related to something that I dislike. I hate education, and I always have. School has never been a fun place for me. In elementary school, I was bored out of my mind. My 5th grade teacher discouraged me from my entrepreneurial pursuits. High school was more about dealing with girl drama than it was about learning meaningful things. By having spent more than 80% of my life suffering through these traumatic experiences, I've become interested in something that I've forever dreaded. While I'm yet to do anything super innovative to help the world of education, my past project internshipIN.com was a start in that direction. I realized that most of my learning came from working at a company, and so I spent my limited free time on helping students find real world internships. More recently, I decided that I hated accounting, I hated finance, and I hated money (although I enjoy the idea of having it). Managing finances is the one thing I despise most in building a company, and nothing stresses me out more than thinking about money. It's the root of all evil, it causes people to kill, it leads to people going to jail (think Madoff), and yet it's the biggest driving force behind every person's life aspirations. So I built a startup, Indinero.com, around the idea of making money suck less for businesses. It's something I plan on dedicating my career to. One of my friends in the investment world recently asked me why I'm building Indinero. After all, why would any young college student want to work on a finance startup? I think about my life as doing two primary things: Minimizing my risk, and minimizing my dissatisfaction with the world. This is an odd way to think about things, because most people think about their life in the opposite way. But I've come to realize that minus the shitty things that happen in life, I'm an optimally happy person. If I can remove the things that crush my soul, I'd be a happier person, and the world would theoretically be a better place. What would you rather do: Make the world a better place, or prevent it from sucking as bad as it does? I'd pick the latter, because it embraces the fact that the world is far from its optimal state. As my friend Manu told me, "make sure you're creating a painkiller instead of a vitamin." As I write this article, I'm suffering from the worst cold I've had in years. I'd pay anything to make this go away, and no cold medication has worked. So thinking about life from my current unhappy perspective, I see the world as a crappy place to live, and I'd be 10X happier if I simply wasn't unhappy. What a seemingly simple idea! Because think about it: during the happiest moments of your life, you probably didn't have anything special or unique that made you happy. But in each and every one of these happiest moments, you lacked the things that would otherwise drive you mad. This past summer was the happiest time of my life. I lived on ramen (literally), I shared a tiny Berkeley home with my team members at Indinero, and I was at the peak of my happiness despite my having zero material assets and close to zero fulfillment in my career. But I didn't have the two things that stress me out most: 1) school and 2) money issues. Between being on summer break and having $35k in the bank (and a startup that creates software that helped cure my finance concerns), I couldn't be happier. Or in more meaningful terms, I couldn't be happier with my life. I'm going to suggest the inverse of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com preaches. He's big on figuring out what makes you happy, and it was inspiring for me to see. But being honest with myself, I felt that it wasn't very satisfying because it just seemed too idealistic for even my liking. If you gave someone a week to think about what makes them happy, they still won't be able to give you the correct answer. People are generally bad at thinking of what makes them happy, so instead of focusing on happiness, I think it's much more practical to focus on unhappiness because it's much easier for us to identify and eliminate. Identifying sources of unhappiness is the easy part. Eliminating them is the difficult part. but it's what makes life seem more interesting. I think entrepreneurs are so fascinating because they first eliminate that point of dissatisfaction in their own life, then dedicate their remaining time to helping others eliminate it too. My mom is a prime example: growing up in a poor family, she had no choice but to wear her older brother's hand-me-downs. There's nothing more depressing than a teenage girl wearing her older brother's ugly clothing. So as a 13 year old, my mom designed and sewed her own clothing. Soon later, she started doing this for others. Fast forward a few decades, and it's the driving force behind her career and the jobs of hundreds of people. As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that identifying your sources of unhappiness is the most effective and honest way for you to live a better life. (and find ideas for your next company) What do you hate? How can you turn it into helping yourself and ultimately helping others? And that's the key to happiness.

I've found this to be true across every type of relationship: friends, family, colleagues, classmates, and of course, significant others. My parents complain to me that my brother doesn't call them as frequently as I do... and they complain not just because my brother doesn't call them, but because their expectations of communicating with my brother are simply different from theirs. Or how about that school project where all 5 of your team members seem to suck? One of my classmates was complaining that all of the nerds in his computer science class weren't putting in any work, but it's not a problem of work ethic so much as its a problem of not setting proper expectations from day one.

When I was recruiting our lead product person to join Indinero, he had already prepared himself to tell me he wasn't interested. His reasoning had nothing to do with the idea, the team, or anything related to the business. He was just scared that our expectations of him would far exceed what he was capable of, when we were actually on the same page all along. Since then, he's been tremendously helpful to the company.

How often do you hear of personal relationships not working out? In almost every case of a breakup, it's that the expectations were off. The guy wanted a casual relationship, the girl wanted more. It's very instinctual, but most people just don't communicate these things. So when the guy starts talking about what he wants in his next girlfriend, the girl's shocked to find out that he hadn't even considered her for marriage. What a disaster...

Not only should expectations be set, but they should be higher than what you're personally expecting. It's like financial planning - you have your "ideal scenario", but in the back of your mind, you know you'll never hit those benchmarks.

Set high expectations, expect low results. Then you'll never be disappointed again!

I think it's funny when people tell me that I'm a risk-taker for being an entrepreneur. I'm the exact opposite - being an entrepreneur just so happens to increase my chances of fulfilling my goals in life, living the lifestyle I want, and enjoying the work I love. By working for an established business, my upper-bound on happiness and fulfillment is greatly reduced. Life is short, and I want to maximize everything.

Everything I do for Indinero is about reducing its risk of failure. Everything. I hire people who are experts at what they do because their chance of doing a better job is higher than mine. I'm charging for the product upfront because it ensures that we're spending time on something we will make money from. I helped win us a grant from Lightspeed Venture Partners to show my team that we thought things through well enough for institutional VCs to give us money (and, of course, to have money). But in order to get that money, I had to show Lightspeed that we already had an established team. So basically, in order to have one, I had to have the other. It's an endless cycle of risk reduction. Team + Capital = Startup. No team = no capital = no startup.

Throughout my summer at Lightspeed Venture Partners' office, I learned that investors were risk-averse too. Their entire business is based on investing in the least-riskiest companies, and that seemed counter-intuitive. But it makes sense. Investors have a finite amount of time to spend with their portfolio companies, a finite number of investments they can make each year, and their job is to ensure a decent payoff for their investors. (yes, can you believe it? institutional investors have investors too) And this means precisely one thing for the entrepreneur seeking venture financing: Everything you do pre-funding should attack the things VCs think about when determining the worth of your company.

Investors like traction. They like a seasoned team, they like paying customers, they like CEOs who come from technical backgrounds, they like young founders, and everything that means that their colleagues won't criticize them for making a bad investment. Yes, your company probably won't need money and probably won't have trouble finding investors if it has all of the above, but it doesn't matter. The fewer risks there are in your company, the more likely you are to get an investment. And this comes to prove my point that investors are for the most part risk-averse.

Lets take a step back. In order to reduce my risk in life (to maximize my personal happiness and fulfillment), I need to build a great company that makes money. And to achieve that, I need to reduce risk for myself, for my (possible future) investors, and obviously for the team members who execute on this dream. People who work at startups have an interesting mindset. They enjoy independence, they like the idea of being an entrepreneur, but they want to come in at a stage with significantly less risk. For example, telling people that Lightspeed Venture Partners gave us money immediately changes the way they look at us, because it sounds like we have our heads on straight. Which means that there's a forever ending cycle of risk reduction: I have to reduce risk in my company enough for customers to signup at a rapid pace, which reduces the risk enough to bring on good investors, which therefore reduces the company's risk enough to hire smart talent, and the sum of all of these things will hopefully make us a low-risk, successful company. Phew.

Don't get me wrong. Starting a company is a risky endeavor, but succeeding comes down to mitigating all of your risks for failure. Instead of writing down a list of things that you should do, start a new list called "things that will lead to my company failing." And on the top of that list will probably be "running out of money." Then take each line-item, figure out how to address it, and then you know exactly what you should be focusing your time and energy on. It's a different way of startup management, but it has completely transformed my company's culture for the better. Remember - before your company has the chance to make billions, the CEO should eat and sleep risk reduction.

Over the past few days, a lot of people have asked: "Why doesn't Indinero.com follow the freemium model?" I wrote about my understanding of freemium a few months ago here on my blog, but ultimately chose not to go that route for several reasons:

1) When users pay, they're more serious about using your product. Instead of just going in to take a look, they'll take a more proactive stance on applying your product to everyday life. As a paying customer, they're also more likely to offer you valuable feedback that will change the way they use your product.

2) The cost per user is high - it costs us money to download data from bank accounts and credit cards. Charging our users immediately addresses this problem.

3) When you charge money upfront, people are more likely to convert and pay for your service. We talked to a few companies that switched from "no credit card upfront" to requiring that you enter your credit card from day 1. They recommend that we charge upfront to increase our conversion rate.

4) We're not sure if freemium is the right way to go. By charging money now, we can always implement a free plan later. If we started off as being a free service, it would turn people off if we ultimately changed our minds and went back to the premium-only model.

5) When raising angel/VC money, it helps to say that our company is earning money. Not having a freemium model got us closer to being able to make that claim. :)

But to be clear, these are just our preliminary thoughts. We may eventually have a freemium offering, but we'll be focused on building our paying user base for the time being. Many businesses prosper on the freemium model, and we're just not convinced that it's fit for what Indinero wants to achieve.

It's almost sad that I'm proud of this, but my internet company Indinero.com is finally post-revenue. In other words, people are using the product, people are paying to use it, and this marks the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship between me and the company I helped start. I've been rather discreet about my entrepreneurial progress, but I'll bring you up to date with my progress:

For a little background, I founded Indinero back in March with co-founder Andy Su. In a nutshell, it's software that helps entrepreneurs manage their finances easily. (Indinero is the Mint.com for Businesses) Our original mission was to make it easy for entrepreneurs to not only keep tabs on their expenses, but also to help them intuitively understand their finances. We got our first big break in April, when Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote us our first check. Getting the money wasn't as "lucky" as I enjoy making it seem... it was a planned process, and we spent many hours trying to convince Lightspeed Venture Partners that we were worth funding for the summer. This included building a product, sending them our first screenshots, and having my connections reach out to lightspeed partners to give recommendations. I'll repeat the most important thing again - they gave us money because we had built a functional prototype.

Fast forward a few months. In July, Indinero was chugging along with many alpha testers and promising feedback. Building a product for small businesses isn't easy, and we knew that raising more money would help us grow. With the goal of more funding in mind, we decided that the smartest thing we could do to convince people of our worth was to sign up of our first paying users, with the goal of relaunching a paid product on August 1st. We missed the deadline by a few days (programming's a bitch), but today we finally signed up several paying customers.

Having paid customers does way more than just prove investors that you're onto something: It forces you to think about building a product that people will actually pay for. As a programmer, you're forced to leave the confines of your comfy office to talk to prospective customers. You figure out what they want, what their pain points are, and you make it work. Something else changed, too: When we told people that we were planning on charging for our service (and that "free" wasn't on the menu), we were taken more seriously. People treated us like a legitimate business, and it further pushed us to make something useful.

Working towards building an internet service with revenue is like an endless spiral of goodness: it makes you build a good product, which makes you money, which makes people treat you more seriously, which makes you want to work harder, which makes you build a better product. I highly recommend that more people try it.

In my selfish ploy to get your feedback on Indinero, I'm giving out 50% discounts to the first 100 entrepreneurs who are willing to be guinea pigs for new ideas and features. More info here.

In building my latest company, many people have asked me "how will this make money?" And even when it was still in its idea stage, I'd quickly say "with a freemium business model, of course." I needed an easy, efficient, and trustworthy way to attract users into paying for a service, and most people assume that a freemium business model works best.

But I think there's a lot more to this thing called "freemium" than meets the eye. It's distinctly different from offering a free trial or a free sample. The biggest problem with freemium is that the conversion rate from free to premium is utterly low -- some say that the average conversion rate is 3%. But in the companies that implement freemium business models well, I see that they attack one thing that customers can't argue with: an actual, urgent need. By doing this, they'll assuredly increase their conversion rate and customer satisfaction. In case you forget, here's a checklist that you can post on your wall:

The key is in acquiring users who are looking for a potential solution to a problem, and may or may not pay depending on what they need. But when they have that urgent need for your upsell, they'll gladly pay. Here are two examples of companies that understand freemium:

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VistaPrint.com is best known for "selling" free business cards. I first heard about them when someone gave me a business card that said "Made by VistaPrint.com" on the back of it. I ordered my first batch of free cards, paid for $5 shipping, and I was a happy camper. The poor souls from VistaPrint made practically nothing off my purchase.

Two years later, and the week before my first TED Conference, I knew that I had an urgent need for business cards. So surely enough, I went back to VistaPrint to get my "free" cards. But fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), they understood that freemium models work best when the customer has an urgent need, and they showed that in their shipping prices. I got free cards from them before, so I knew they were good. But I needed a new batch within 72 hours, and VistaPrint made a nice profit from the rushed shipping costs that I paid them. Take a look at their pricing breakdown for free business cards:

I think the key here is that VistaPrint spent less time worrying about features that would be "nice to have", and more time on selling me something that I absolutely needed to have, and something I'd obviously be willing to pay for. Props to them!

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Another company that's done a great job at freemium is PBworks.com. (formerly known as PBwiki). I worked there last summer, so I had a lot of time to think about why their model works so well. Firstly, the company targets so many different demographics: individuals, students, teachers, companies, conferences, engaged couples, people trying to lose weight, among others. But most of these users will never pay for PBworks, because they don't have a need to. And even if there were "cooler" features that PBworks could offer, these users probably wouldn't pay. As a student using the product for personal use, I remember ignoring the upgrade button on the top right of the screen, and using PBworks as far as free would take me. In fact, I still have a personal wiki I use for taking notes in class, and I see myself as the type of user who'd never want to pay for premium features.

But now I run a company, and we love our PBworkspace. In fact, I think I'm addicted. But my colleagues and interns are too. And while I'd still do anything possible not to pay for "cool-to-have" premium features, PBworks is smart enough to make me pay for its service because I need it. There were two things that they could do: cut me off after I made too many edits to my wiki, or heavily encourage me to pay when I'd have a clear need. They chose the latter route.

This is precisely why the "per user" model is so powerful. You get the benefits of a full-fledged product, but you only pay for what you need. For the first 3 users, PBworks is free, but when I bring in more people, I have to pay $8/user. Which is a relatively small cost to pay for something that I'll probably need to have. Take a look at their pricing structure. Note that I omitted the free plan.

What's interesting about this is that the difference between the "Professional" and "Professional Plus" plans is trivial. We normally expect the most expensive plan to have 20 baller features that the others don't have, just to convince you to pay for the more expensive plan. But PBworks isn't that naive: they realize that as long as you have a need for more than 3 people to collaborate on a wiki, (which is pretty much every organization out there), you'll pay for the product out of sheer need. And the difference between their "Professional" and "Professional Plus" plans shows their understanding of this too: Some organizations need to have 24/7 live support, and they're willing to pay for that.

But at the end of the day, when the organization's decision maker needs to figure out which PBworks plan to purchase, it isn't comparing featuresets between plans. It's about selecting the one plan that solves the needs you have, and PBworks and other enterprise software companies such as Freshbooks and Salesforce do this well.

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So ask yourself, "where is the actual need?" With VistaPrint, the need comes down to getting business cards in a timely manner. With PBworks, the need is when an organization has more than 3 users on a wiki. For Indinero, my current company, the need is when a company has more than 2 bank/credit card accounts that they need to keep track of. By thinking about "what the user needs" rather than thinking about "what a user sees as cool features to have", you'll be taking full-advantage of the beautiful thing called freemium.

Speaking of smart marketing, VistaPrint decided to give you guys a 25% discount on all products, and an 80% discount on premium business cards. For a product that I've actually paid full-price for, I highly recommend them. If you run into another company with a unique business model, please send me a tip at jessicamah (at) jessicamah.com.