I was only with them for six months and after that time they managed to irreversibly destroy everything I had been working on, including the backups I'd paid for. (They said that the backups were on a different server which also happened to catastrophically fail at the same time...)
I want to love MediaTemple, and I agree that their support is excellent, and I accept that terrible accidents happen, but I can never bring myself to use them in a production environment ever again. (The project I was hosting with them was in a sort of private beta, and although I had second backups of the code I had very very foolishly trusted the Snapshot backups with all my user data. Lesson learned.)
Anyway, I'm just one dissenting data point in a giant sea of happy customers. I don't mean to dissuade anyone from using MT--just please don't be any less paranoid about their service than the rest.
First of all, congrats on getting this far. As you know, your consulting biz is a straight services play and will only grow in relation to how many employees you have. Increasing price to match demand will only get you so far (unless you're a superstar). You do have a lot of options to grow depending on what kind of work you want to do.
- Build a network and do a rev share with other freelancers with different specialities. This will allow you to offload tasks you are mediocre at and focus on what you do well. This should increase network productivity and deal flow IF you find the right people.
- Expand on the cheap. Outsource specific tasks offshore. Do not outsource entire projects. To outsource for cost, you must break down everything into small manageable pieces.
- Move into account management and client services. Find firms/other freelancers who compete on cost and distribute your work over them. Quality and profit per project will drop but you should be able to increase your project flow significantly.
IMHO the best way is to build products and move out of services.
(I've done this a few times and currently have a small network of other freelancers while I work at a bootstrapped company.)
Some tnooz coverage[1] hit my inbox which answered my question. I love the idea of room concierge and hope you guys can increase the granted request rate. Best of luck.
Thanks Grah4! Sorry for my delayed response, we were up quite late last night. I think people will really start picking up on it once they've tried it out and get a better room.
I am not a gamedev but I am currently building what some would consider to be a large game[1]. It has been amazing to work in as it streamlines the development process massively. I have only spent about 20 hours with it so far and if I had chosen another engine I would not have progressed this fast.
You should take another look at Unity when v3.5 launches - they have made some advancements and fixes that are targeted for larger projects[2]. I can't wait for a better gui system and native lod support!
As for the negatives, so far I have only found the documentation to be lacking on some fronts (specifically regarding the terrain engine).
Community of whom? Active developers or passive users? Development and usage of a product are not the same thing. ^_^
Yes, it has grown, and now it is going flat. Try to visualize the trend - imagine a bell curve (the only type of curve hackers know) and point out where the current time stamp is - on a growing or falling slope? ^_^
OK, to look a little bit more professional: doing a major rewrite of already mature project is a tricky thing (look what a terrible mess Gnome3 is or a recent Ubuntu), because users are passive and tend to use what they call a stable versions.
We can see the same situation with Python3 (although it has real improvements and much less buggy) and with ruby19, where the Rails guys are pushing it as hard as they can, but inert users still want 1.8.
So, users are happy with drupal6 and variety of third-party modules, while independent developers are losing their interest.
That is not useful information. It only indicates that someone with package commit privileges decided to package Drupal 6 for Ubuntu 11.10. It doesn't mean anything about usage, developers, community, etc.
To put this into perspective, Debian once had a Webmin package in the distant past (about 10 years ago)...at a time when we had far less than a million new downloads per year (might have even been in the low hundreds of thousands). We're currently at about 3 million new downloads a year, and growing every year, and there is no Ubuntu or Fedora package for Webmin.
All you can assert based on a lack of packages in the standard OS repo is that there is a lack of packages in the standard OS repo.
Well considering that there are about 12,000 projects hosted on Drupal.org and that it has it's own packaging system this is a pretty pointless example. I've never met anyone using apt to install PHP applications. Given the ways that apt usually installs a PHP app, I'm not really surprised either.
I think the pricing page is giving you a high ctr % because it's really the only option for a visitor to understand the product.
Perhaps you should work on your template and include a simple features page as well. CTR from features -> pricing would be more meaningful than what you have atm. The very best measure though is email subscribe opt-ins (bonus points for double opt-ins).
Although you should really have a statistically valid number of uniques to qualify the idea (a few k). Keep working on your process and generating more ideas and you'll find something with market fit!
Depends on how little. 0.5% is not an unreasonable conversion rate for product purchase. 1-5% is probably good for email signups.
A lot of people click through to pricing pages just to see what it is like. I do that, even when I know I won't be purchasing the product on that visit. Only signups and clicks on "Buy Now" are legit stats for conversion numbers.
We were in the same situation and settled for mispelledword.net while we were in dev - until we stumbled onto an auction for the word.com and picked it up for ~$2k. We were incredibly lucky though.
If you can't reach them or don't have the budget and that name is The One go with D.
