For all practical purposes, starting a business (and not giving up too soon) is basically what this ride is: The Vomit Comet. The oscillations of emotions and steeping towards failure at each trough and thinking things are going swell at each crest are huge. The swings, or the amplitude if you will, is so great that it induces vomit. Ok, maybe not literally but figuratively in the sense that most people can't (or won't) stomach it. Why? It's the classical reasons:

1. Uncertainty can be an absolute Great Wall for a lot of people who grew up with paths paved in Golden Certainty. If you're only barely comfortable with not knowing answers to burning questions, how does you body respond... physically?

2. Family demands. If you have a family to support, the lack of a paycheck, a low paycheck, or an unpredictable paycheck can be a destroyer of hopes and dreams. A lot of people cite this reason for why parents don't usually start startups (or don't have the time to do so). I contend: Isn't your family already hope and a dream? Let alone an achievement? DISCLAIMER: I started Poll Everywhere perfectly single and and perfectly family-free; what do I know!? In other words, starting and building a great family in itself is a lot of work that even talented people have a tough time doing.

3. Lack of passion and drive. If you're starting something you don't really believe in it or you only "kinda" believe in it, it won't work. That's just a given. Find the thing you believe in. Get behind it. Hold it up and support it. Think about it in the shower. Breathe it in from the outside.

4. Believing in something but focusing on the glamour or focusing on the money. The fact is focusing on either of these are deal killers. The tragic truth? Some people actually DO succeed being vainly obsessed with these concepts because of their other, otherwise positive, personality traits and talents. However, deep down, are they actually fulfilled and truly happy (beyond wildly wealthy)? Answer: No. And to that, I say, fuck wealth, what's the point? If you aren't very fulfilled or very happy, the amount of wealth you have will never, ever matter. In fact, it becomes a dangerous liability. To those that are wealthy, "successful," and yet privately unfulfilled and unhappy, I fear for you. DISCLAIMER: As a matter of income, I make more than is ever "needed" to be happy and I can vouch that "another dollar" doesn't make one bit of difference between the current and the last. I promise.

5. Lack of self-esteem or self-confidence. These are just straight-up deal killers. When you lack self-esteem or self-confidence, they will do nothing but prevent you from creating and doing great things. In fact, low self-esteem and/or low self-confidence don't provide any other value besides holding you back. They don't even reflect reality! They are mental, fictional blockades you inadvertently designed by yourself to exempt yourself from actually doing something difficult. Here's the problem, though: While they are mental blocks, they are very, very real blocks and they can in fact destroy hopes and dreams. How do you get around this? Well, if this describes yourself, the best advice is to literally IGNORE yourself. Neglect your emotions. Forge ahead anyways. Treat yourself almost as a 3rd party observer heckling your every move. Just ignore it and move forward. Like a pawn on the chessboard, you either move forward or attack diagonally. You just can't go backwards.

So what about those hopes and dreams? Well, instead of getting to your deathbed and regretting the work you did (or rather, didn't do) for a lifetime or how you "skated by" or how you had to just do X but never go to do Y because of X, well... stop, just... STOP. Literally, put your hand out and stop the oncoming onslaught of crap for one more day. Go create the thing in your dreams, the thing in your hopes. Literally, one, single, little, short, lifetime. That's all you have. Then, that's it. Poof. You're gone. No afterlife. None. No spirit in the sky. Don't bet on that. Bet on the NOW, bet on the HERE. Don't waste it. Go forth, stop the crap you're working on, and start (even part-time!) working on the non-crap.

Your fellow global citizens will thank you and maybe they'll even remember you. If they don't and you still did something great for them, then who cares? If you did something great and nobody knows, you still did it anyways. The anonymity of greatness is even better than being known. It's not the fame, it's not the fortune, it's the doing something great in the first place that matters. It's doing the thing that matters, that matters.

Pretty much every business falls somewhere on the spectrum of personal service and product scale. On one end, you have highly personalized products or services: First class air travel, hair stylists, management consultants. On the other end, you have product scale: Toilet paper, cereal, gasoline, etc. There is a pattern here, for sure, in that on the personal service end of things, you tend to have non-commodity products or services and at the product scale end of things, you have commodity products and services.

What about the hair stylist, though, you might ask? Everyone needs a haircut! And indeed, this is true, everyone pretty much does need a haircut, styling, or a trim here and there. The majority of people get some form of a haircut with regularity. Does that, then, make it a commodity in which personal service is no longer valued or necessary? No, in fact, it doesn't. But why? Well, the same reasons pretty much apply to hair stylists as they do to first class air travel or management consultants; they can't easily be replaced, in general, with totally automated services or be fully supplanted by technology.

On the one hand, a hair stylist can use more advanced tools or techniques which make her job easier. First class air travel could also use the latest in entertainment systems and electronic reclining seats or suites to enhance the traveler's experience by relying on self-service but not sacrifice the overall full quality of the whole experience. In the end, though, these types of services still have functions that necessitate a human being. Although we want to believe that we could automate the first class cabin of an airplane with robots, and quite frankly with today's technology, we could get pretty close, we still can't completely replace humans with technology and automation and end up with the same result. So of course humans and their pesky, picky ways persist. ; )

Over time, though, and continued improvement of technology may lend itself to even more automation of traditionally human-powered service functions, it will take some time, especially with more of the higher-order functions such as natural language and input, as well cognition and artificial intelligence; not to mention the simple act of recognizing a customer by face or name and relying on a previous rapport with that person. It's hard to get machines to have the same impact. After all, am I talking to a machine or a human? Then again, that's the basis for the Turing test.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have product scale. You don't need to speak with someone when you buy and then later eat cereal from a box. It's common shared knowledge that you can eat the cereal however you want or add it to a bowl with some milk. Same for toilet paper; there's no need to contact the company on how to wipe your ass! It's already pretty well known. Even the "features" of toilet paper such as how many sheets are in a roll, how many rolls are in a package/box, to how soft or double-ply it is, are all fairly well understood things about toilet paper. No need to call an 800 number and ask questions about, "How does this work? Can you walk me through how your product works?" It's just understood. Naturally, the fact that you don't need to talk to someone means that time and cost required to buy the product is a lot less than one that is highly personalized. After all, a 30 minute session with your hair stylist will range anywhere from $12-$15 on the low end up to $50+ on the high-end. Both of those numbers would buy you a lot of toilet paper.

What does this mean for businesses? My hunch is that it's best to be on the forefront of moving a product or service *down the curve* meaning you make a product or service more accessible to more people by making it less reliant on human interaction and thus, hopefully, also more affordable and easy to use. Not everything, as I said, can easily be migrated in this fashion. However, this is the basis for many products and services such as my own company, Poll Everywhere (polleverywhere.com). We felt, deep down, that live audience interaction shouldn't require any more know-how or hand-holding than, perhaps, using Microsoft PowerPoint itself might require. As much as using slides in one's presentation has become the norm, we feel interacting with the people you're speaking to should also become the norm. The path to doing that means that you have to make using the tool as easy as something people already expect, even if it isn't the same thing that they already know.

However, between personal service and product scale exists a massive chasm of business that fall somewhere within. Some businesses do rely on partly personal service aspect in addition to a product scale aspect. Take many enterprise-software packages out there; many of them offer lots of consulting and up-start services initially, which help the client along in the early stages learn the ropes and modify their business processes appropriately. In the later stage, there's a lot less reliance on the personal service aspects and instead a reliance on a regular stream of maintenance needs, which are far less demanding than the initial startup costs. Many businesses follow this mode, in fact.

So where does your business fall on the spectrum? It's good to know this and, if you agree with me, perhaps the next innovation in your space is taking what you do to the next level by removing some of the personal service aspects. And remember, it isn't because you don't care or don't feel people deserve to interact with other people in your business but instead it is because making a useful product/service more accessible can make it more valuable to more people, with less time wasted, and at lower costs. And as well all know, automation is a key ingredient behind progress which can be measured by the number of things one can accomplish without thinking.

Somewhere in my Facebook profile, I have under political views, "Producing and Consuming." Frankly, that's pretty much what I believe but what does that mean exactly?

Practically regardless of income, people in western cultures shower and cleanse their bodies everyday. Guess what? That takes about 15-30 minutes. No matter how rich you and wealthy you are, it takes the same 15-30 minutes. Everyone has to eat and although the rich might be eating quail eggs and crab legs, they still have to eat and it takes about the same amount of effort and time as someone hitting the local soup kitchen. Relationships between married couples are almost just as difficult or stressful, happy and sad, regardless of income. People still go to school for the first 18-22 years of life, regardless of income level, even if the more wealthy have a tendency to get "better" schools than the less wealthy. The rich still have to piss and shit like the rest of us and still have to wipe their ass, even if you consider some of them might have the cool Japanese style toilets with the built-in heated seat and the bidet.

Here's a list of things that, if they were 10 times faster or easier, could have a profound effect on our lives:

* Learning 18-22 years of formal education in 3
* Automatic folding of your clothes, in addition to cleaning them (low cost, not outsourced laundry)
* Toasting your bread, perfectly, in 5 seconds
* Cleaning your teeth in 5 seconds and not even requiring you to use the bathroom sink
* Only needing to go to the bathroom half as many times as you do currently in a day
* A body cleaning system that cleans your entire body in 30 seconds, as a replacement for a shower, with similar results
* A convection oven that heats up (or cools down) to the target temperature almost instantly

There's certainly more than what I've listed here but you get the idea. If you wanted to come up with some thing really innovative, consider something that might fall in one of these areas. For example, could we invent a product or service that is different than a traditional shower that takes, say, 30 seconds and can clean the whole body, not to mention save plenty of water (and electricity or natural gas)? Could we invent something that expands our brain faster than it does naturally to speed up education (whoa)? Is there something we could invent that might allow us to not have to go to the bathroom as often? Is there some way to do more systematic and structural relationship mapping to put people that truly are the most compatible and interested in each other together as a couple, to reduce stress to its optimal level, to reduce argumentation or distraction?

Anyways, these kinds of things always fascinate me. Major improvements in our every day activities are some of the things that could have the most profound effects on our lives. Just imagine if you could make cleaning your teeth no more than a painless, simple 5 second procedure instead of a 1-3 minute procedure, twice a day. What if it didn't even require you to go to the bathroom sink to do it and still get the same hygienic benefit? It would be amazing.

Often overlooked in our lives is the potential for wanting to do something well that is not in parallel with what we are intrinsically good at doing. The trouble here affects so many people who, for example, might be an incredibly talented gymnast but feel whole-heartedly like they want to be a full-time litigation attorney. What you end up with is unfortunately neither one of them. While that person is busy ignoring their natural talent as a gymnast, they also suck at being a trial lawyer.

There really isn't much of a way around this. Some people do find a way to practice, practice, practice and overcome weaknesses they may have in a subject area they aren't naturally talented in but ultimately, that is the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps this is why parents and teachers tell every child that "everyone is good at something." Ultimately, that's true, provided that person wants to do the very thing they are already decent at doing.

This phenomenon is important to recognize for personal development reasons as it means that the very thing you might be incredibly good at might not necessarily be the thing you want to spend the rest of your life doing. For example. someone who is amazingly great at sales might not be a great a product manager no matter how many random odds and ends hours they put in to try to grow into a great product manager. While some of these folks may become great product managers, most will fail. Given that statistic, perhaps this might convince some people to re-think and re-evaluate switching careers just because they're not liking it in that moment. I'm not suggesting people merely settle but I am suggesting people ask themselves, deeply, what it is they really want to be doing while considering their existing, amazing talents to society in an area they may not have a very current interest in.

When Chargify recently changed their pricing to remove Free accounts (aka Freemium) and also require all existing Free accounts to pay up or cancel, it was only far too predictable that everyone who was previously being charged $0 would go and complain and whine that they must now be charged $99 by calling the company irrational, greedy, or whatever other dubious term they can think of. Meanwhile, I'm sure almost none of them accepted any of the blame for such a tainted business relationship in the first place (placing the critical nature of collecting money from people in the hands of someone who is helping you do it for no money at all).

Here again is a situation I have been writing about on several occasions that people just cannot seem to accept as fact about the marketplace. The truth is that if you're basing your business, and in particular a critical part of it (ie *collecting money* from *paying customers*) then you cannot reasonably expect a company to come along, offer to do it for Free, and then expect that it stay that way permanently. How many times can this be repeated? There is no free lunch, people. Why does this lesson have to keep being re-learned over and over again?

My own business, Poll Everywhere, does offer a Free plan and we have no plans to remove that offering but that could certainly change one day for reasons I can't even predict right now. Generally speaking, I will say that when we do make plan changes, even to paid plans, we will grandfather in customers on old plans. Even the decision to grandfather in old plan customers is not taken lightly and depending on the circumstances, we may even be in a position where can't (for reasonable business and/or economic reasons) grandfather in old customers, although that has not happened yet.

In any event, my business offers a Free plan (aka Freemium) and it also utilizes the services of many other companies using their Free plans. For example, we have a Facebook page which is a free service. We use Twitter, also a free service, for customer relationships quite a bit, too. We even use Posterous, another free service for which I also use for my own personal blog. I'm sad to say this but I expect that because we are paying these companies $0 to use their services, there is an inherent risk that they will not be able to sustain that offering forever or that they may be forced to shutdown and not offer service to anyone, even paying customers (if they were ever to do such a thing, which I doubt). The important thing that I realize about these "free" services is that is a risk that I assume as a customer who is paying nothing to consume them. I also use Gmail and pay Google, Inc. absolutely nothing to use their awesome email service. Guess what? If they have to shutdown Gmail or start charging for it, that's a risk I have to deal with as a consumer of that service. I could very well lose 5 or 6GB of emails if I don't maintain my own offline copies/backups for it.

In the case of Chargify, there are reasonable gripes from Free customers who claim they invested thousands in development time and perhaps other resources and services in order to integrate with Chargify. I can't quite fathom the logic, however, that if they invested thousands in such things to make it possible that suddenly paying $99/month would somehow be unreasonable to support their continued, on-going usage of Chargify's services. Chargify makes it clear that, perhaps their fault for mis-calculating (not uncommon for a new business), that keeping the Free plan in place would have ultimately bankrupted the company, which of course works for NO ONE as then they would have to cease operations completely, even for existing paying customers. That's definitely a losing situation for everyone involved. Again, back to the sunk cost problem, I can see people's lament towards their sunk cost of integrating with Chargify to try to justify why they were entitled to the Free service but it is not unreasonable to assume that if you have the time, money, and resources to integrate with a service like Chargify that you would be unable to afford $99/month to collect money from paying customers. Perhaps if you cannot afford it, then either you're running a hobby or you don't have a viable business in the first place. And if that's the case, Chargify is only a great piece of evidence that shows you can't run an awesome recurring payments solution provider business by giving it away and that should be a signal to you, the merchant who is consuming such services, that in order to collect money from paying customers at all, you have to pay to play.

Pay to play holds true even if you don't have customers for awhile. Guess what? It's called *investing in your business* which is something we all have to deal with in new ventures. You can't try your hand at every business and pay nothing to do so until suddenly it somehow "works" and the same goes for collecting money from real, paying customers. Why in the world would you want to put that sensitive function of your business in the hands of a service provider who is providing it for Free in the first place? That just seems too much risk to me in the first place and at the time, would have called into question the long-term viability of the company itself. Besides, we all know, new businesses have a tendency to fail 50% of the time within the first 5 years of life and this is a known statistic published by the Small Business Administration. It's certainly not much different for startups, who themselves start off (initially) as small businesses, dealing with tighter margins, sunk capital costs, higher salaries, and probably running a loss for a period of time using investment (personal or otherwise). Even my own business in theory should "not be trusted" by this logic but it's a risk we take when doing business with and interacting with new businesses. Let's not let the old, Big Dumb Companies get away with murder, though, as even they fail sometimes, too (need I mention names? Enron, Blockbuster... etc etc etc). To that end, I will say our business is doing more than well enough that we are very unlikely to cease being in business anytime soon.

Perhaps this burden of pain should in fact be more fairly shared between the business (Chargify) and its potential customers (the Free plan businesses). Paying $99/month to collect money from people doesn't seem like a bad idea, even if I have zero customers initially. Provided I have the wherewithal and confidence to actually go find paying customers for whatever business I am in before I spend too much time and money trying to keep it running while collecting nothing, that isn't unreasonable to pay.

Now, I don't want to say that Chargify isn't at fault for other things which they could have done differently while still achieving the main goal of eliminating the Free offering:

• They really should have provided more advanced notice for their existing Free plan users (or considered a case-by-case basis up to, say, 6 months).
• Alternatively, they could have weighed the opportunity of doing a grandfathered plan if the above option wouldn't work.
• They could have also tested this change on a sub-set of their Free plan users first before announcing it as official for all. This would have reduced the negative PR issues perhaps considerably and then given them a chance to find an alternate approach while still achieving the ultimate objective of eliminating the Free option.
• A discounted plan specifically for existing Free users only to get on a paying plan (as a "Thank-You For Sticking With Us" during the early, often unpredictable days of a startup's life).

Even though that may have screwed up in executing the change, it likely was the right change to make for the long-haul and the CEO of Chargify reflects on the announcement and the lessons learned bluntly on his blogpost.

Fatherhood is not for everyone. It is incredibly difficult and to assume the shoes of a great father requires reflection on the past of other great fathers. I can absolutely point to none other than my own father: Brian Eby, Sr. Without a doubt, he is one of my most important mentors in my life. He has certainly bestowed upon me his advice, his wisdom, and his learnings, and certainly whatever viewpoints I choose to disagree with! Looking back, though, I can safely say that my father has been one of my most important allies, my most important mentors, and an omnipresent force and friend in my life. He is someone who I love and who is forever unforgettable and yet will be the most difficult to let go of when he (or I) leaves this world first.

Seeing Evelyn Eby grow up as fast as she has, it has become a new reality of being a role model and caretaker for someone who is literally a part of me; shared DNA, if you will? Your relationship with your child is a relationship like nothing you have ever imagined otherwise, and yet it is an extension of relationships you already have (after all, all of my father, my mother, my brother, and my sister, are all a part of Evelyn, in some small way). Certainly, to some degree, it goes back to the idea that we are all of the same material, and in fact, we very might well be.

However, focusing in on my father specifically, I reflect so fondly. I have always loved him; I have always had the utmost respect and yet, even during the hardest times when I felt as though I "hated" him the most (like when I was in 7th grade and threatened to "run away"), I knew that my father (and both of my parents, in general) would always be there for me, no matter what. It is a relationship unmatched by another.

With as much as my father and I are different, there are many things I will (and do) take after him that I admire and that I will, consciously or unconsciously, instill within Evelyn: My rationale, penchant for writing, and emotional expressiveness. Arguably, I will influence the love of my life, Catherine, in much the same way as the man I have become, influenced in part because of my father. It is an inescapable part of who I am: My father is. Realizing the profound nature of his influence has given me a new tenderness in how I wish to treat and raise Evelyn. I know that, no matter how hard I try, or how much I fail, or how much I succeed, my actions will forever shape the course of Evelyn's future life. Not because she is just "someone" but because she is mine.

What is mine is what I mind...

Following up from a previous post about how dumb it would be to regulate free web services (located here: http://seaneby.com/regulate-free-web-services-lets-see-why-thats), Dan Shafer was making some pretty illogical arguments, and certainly ones that could never sit well with a free market economy (yep, turns out people DO get hurt sometimes, imagine that). Steve Dembo of Discovery Education also wrote about paying for services that may also offer a free option here recently: http://www.teach42.com/2010/08/17/love-free-web-2-0-sites-then-pay-for-them/

In any case, this article about Ning, published on Aug. 20th, 2010 (http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/08/20/free-of-freemium-things-are-st..., explains in more detail the follow-up to what has transpired since Ning eliminated the free offerings. 2 interesting things to note are how Ning is doing better now that they have shed their freeloading free users as well as some of the reasons behind why they did this. From the article:

"Here’s the reason why Jason Rosenthal — the person who stepped up from his chief operator role to mop up the Ning mess as chief executive — explains why he’s forcing every Ning network creator into a paid plan: While Ning’s sprawling empire of free communities brought it many people, these people did not bring it many dollars. 300,000 free communities brought in only 20% of revenue and 25% of traffic; 15,000 paying customers footed the rest.

Before Rosenthal took control of the company Ning was at low end of the generally accepted 5% to 10% conversion rate needed to support a freemium business model. It converted just under 5% of its total user base into paying customers. Low conversion rates aren’t necessarily catastrophic, as demonstrated by Skype, but Ning’s freemium freeriders sucked down its most expensive resources — headcount, bandwidth and infrastructure — at a rate Ning could not support."

In the first paragraph, you can correctly see that it is certainly about money, which at the root of the matter, is of course greed. Greed was one of the reasons Dan Shafer cited in his post on why we should regulate free web services: http://danshafer.posterous.com/do-free-services-have-an-obligation-to-users

Of course, he's right, it is about greed. Turns out, consuming as much free shit from the free buffet of online services is also greedy. So I guess we're in this boat together. And besides, as they say, "Greed is good," according to our favorite Gordon Gekko (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7upG01-XWbY). Greed is certainly one of several motivators that drives so many people to create new and innovative things. You know, like the internet.

In the second paragraph in the quote above, however, you can also see that not only was it about greed and making ever more money but also about sustainability, survival, and growth of the company. If you read between the lines, this is exactly why some businesses need not have a free offering at all; the economics of keeping the entire service running might not make sense.

So, once again, people, stop bitching about free services going away or how paid services *should be free*. It's not worth the crying: Get up from your armchair and go do something more meaningful instead.