The Startup Success Podcast
This week Bob talks with Nathaniel Talbott, founder of Spreedly, a subscription management service for startups. If your startup works with subscriptions instead of sales, managing those subscriptions quickly turns into a major undertaking. Nathaniel talks about how Spreedly came about, how he bootstrapped from consulting to startup, one way to keep partner disagreements to a minimum, and more.
Bob talks about why you need to be read in on the Free economy, and Pat shares both a recommended book on making your message stick and tips for web designers on the .NET platform.
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Bob Walsh is on twitter at http://twitter.com/bobwalsh or you can email him at bob.walsh@47hats.com.
Patrick Foley is on twitter at http://twitter.com/patrickfoley or you can email him at patrick.foley@microsoft.com
Show Notes:
URLs mentioned in this episode of the Startup Success Podcast:
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.
- The web site, Made to Stick.
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.
- Free – on Google Books.
- Free – a PDF excerpt.
- Chris Anderson’s blog.
- The Free audiobook podcast on iTunes.
- Spreedly.
- The Spreedly Blog.
- On Twitter: @spreedly, @ntalbott (other founders: @duffomelia,
@kohlhofer, @thejohnny). - Microsoft Expression.
- Microsoft SketchFlow.
Thoroughly enjoyed the show – it was great to hear how Nathaniel made the transition from a consulting company into product development.
He also mentioned that his company is somewhat virtual given that the team is so distributed – virtual companies is a topic I’d enjoy hearing more about.
Thanks for the great show.
…one more item: this was the first time I had been introduced to the concept of “kick start” financing – it’s intriguing and very clever – I’d love to hear more about it in a future show.
Interesting podcast and I have two questions:
A) For what type of software SAS model works better?
Is it for desktop application?
B) It seems that GetSatisfaction service is more for software developer oriented businesses than for consumer ones. Isn’t it? Is there any research about
those people who have account there or companies using it?
Hi Maksym,
A – big question! I’d say apps that don’t require heavy processing and are at heart CRUD business apps. CMS anything, but also apps where some or all of the value comes via the networking of users. check out Chapter 3, “So many Platforms, So many Options” of The Web Startup Success Guide (http://www.amazon.com/Web-Startup-Success-Guide/dp/1430219858) – 50 pages of platform compare/contrast. And Rick Chapman’s SaaS stats are very relevant.
B – I would disagree. GetSatisfaction is all about responsive customer service; I think it would work for consumer or business apps. You might want to check out UserVoice.com too.