| How do we offer so much for so little a price? |
We bootstrapped. This means we only grew and added services as our income from account sales allowed. It also meant that we learned how to keep overhead low.
We didn't buy those $1000 fancy ergonomic chairs, nor the foosball tables, nor the glass and chrome $1500/sf office space (for an internet firm? What counts with an Internet firm is the datacenter, people can code and handle support from anywhere), nor did we buy any of the other non-essentials that many of our competitors did (if you want to be big you have to look big, right?). We didn't even buy them at 1/4 of their original price during said competitor's going out of business sales. We don't toss our money away.
Instead we add new services with it and just keep giving you more for your money.
(Of note: our very first subscribers paid $5.95 a month for just a pop account with a webmail interface and a cgi proxy, they trusted us to build the service bigger and better, we did exactly that).
In fact, if you consider this: we currently offer quite a number of features and services, so this must show that we are successful enough at this to have a fair number of users to support those features and services (bootstrapping), it then must follow that we must be pretty good at what we offer because all of our advertising is, and always has been, word of mouth alone. So you have little to risk in trying us out and we are fairly certain you'll remain a customer if you do.
|
|
|
|
|
