It's largely a question of messaging this change to customers, dealing with approximately 7,000 existing customers and answering "No, no, don't worry, YOU still get it for life!", changing marketing copy site-wide, yadda yadda yadda... and then, pot-of-gold-at-end-of-rainbow-style, getting a few thousand bucks extra in 2013.
Call it, oh, two weeks of work. Two weeks at my consulting rate is... umm... a more reliable method of getting a fairly sizable chunk of money up-front, if I am interested in getting more money right away. Two weeks of work on AR, by comparison, gets me fairly little money right now but gets me much closer to where I eventually want to be than the same marginal work on BCC. (e.g. I did two weeks of work on AR in the last two months, and increased paying customers by 50%. Not like rate of acquisition, like total. Feel free to guesstimate how much that is worth to either a) my income in 2013 or b) the implied value of owning 100% of the shares in AR. It's a heck of a lot more than either a) how much money BCC could reasonably make in 2013 or b) the delta in implicit sale values of BCC. There are other projects I could spend two weeks on, with a variety of professional and personal goals attached, which all sound more fun to me.
As of September 2012, BCC is a fun laboratory I get to play in (and draw stories from) more than it is a core line of business for me.
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It's largely a question of messaging this change to customers, dealing with approximately 7,000 existing customers and answering "No, no, don't worry, YOU still get it for life!", changing marketing copy site-wide, yadda yadda yadda... and then, pot-of-gold-at-end-of-rainbow-style, getting a few thousand bucks extra in 2013.
Call it, oh, two weeks of work. Two weeks at my consulting rate is... umm... a more reliable method of getting a fairly sizable chunk of money up-front, if I am interested in getting more money right away. Two weeks of work on AR, by comparison, gets me fairly little money right now but gets me much closer to where I eventually want to be than the same marginal work on BCC. (e.g. I did two weeks of work on AR in the last two months, and increased paying customers by 50%. Not like rate of acquisition, like total. Feel free to guesstimate how much that is worth to either a) my income in 2013 or b) the implied value of owning 100% of the shares in AR. It's a heck of a lot more than either a) how much money BCC could reasonably make in 2013 or b) the delta in implicit sale values of BCC. There are other projects I could spend two weeks on, with a variety of professional and personal goals attached, which all sound more fun to me.
As of September 2012, BCC is a fun laboratory I get to play in (and draw stories from) more than it is a core line of business for me.
Interesting, thanks - I'd completely ignored the messaging the side of things ;)