

On pivoting: how we're trying to deal with the unintended use of our product - primigenus
http://blog.quplo.com/2011/03/the-influence-of-unintended-use/

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Vivtek
Throttle requests (maybe at the IP level) for the prototypes, but resell
hosting. Redirect your third-level domains transparently for the hosted sites
- make it dead easy, just a matter of clicking a box to "add public hosting".
Then keep the prototype there as the testbed for new development, with a
button to "Click to publish".

That will take you, what, a whole day to set up? It's a no-brainer.

~~~
mrtnkl
This is indeed one of the more viable options that we've been thinking about.

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bobfunk
Funny, with <http://www.webpop.com> we've kinda run into the opposite dilemma.

We're building a fully hosted CMS, with redundant, load balanced hosting,
custom data types, generic non-branded client interface and so on.

But during our beta period we've discovered that it's also just about the
easiest way we know to get a quick prototype or experiment online.

Now while deciding on our pricing, we get into a dilemma. If we go with the
typical per project pricing model of most other hosted CMSs, aimed at
agencies, we wouldn't really make it viable to use Webpop for quick
experiments, prototypes or mostly static pages.

So now we're pondering if we can come up with a set of plans that supports
both ways of using Webpop...

~~~
jdp23
Good problem to have!

Have you considered a separate "prototyping" product, with different branding
and pricing? It could potentially reach a very complementary audience ...

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primigenus
webpop minus the CMS and with a prototyping slant actually ends up sounding
very similar to quplo. Not sure what that means. Perhaps 3 years from now
we'll both look back and realise we were making the same thing...

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bobfunk
I actually always assumed that you guys had consciously come up with a
brilliant way of creating a hosted CMS through a lean/customer-driven approach
by focusing on a rapid prototyping tool first! :)

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jdp23
"hey! you got a hosted CMS system on my rapid prototyping tool!"

"hey! you got a rapid prototying tool on my hosted CMS system!"

cue music ... "two great tastes, that taste great together ..."

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jckay
Hey Guys,

Interesting article - just tweeted it. While i wouldnt say i am part of the
"lean startup cult" - i must say i really like their stance on Pivoting.

The Flickr example is a great one, smart companies, the truly smart ones you
find always had to pivot a few times. It has certainly happened at the company
i work for (Grasshopper).

We used to be called GotVMail - we realized that being voicemail focused wasnt
the right strategy, and that really we were a communications solution for
entrepreneurs. We bit the bullet, as pivoting is always taking one step back
to go forward. But its been amazing for our business ever since.

Good luck!

~~~
necrecious
Hey Jon, good to see you on HN. I guess that's one draw back on a descriptive
name, it is much harder to change your branding.

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jdp23
This was a great post. Situations like this are a big challenge for any
startup: on the one hand it's a huge opportunity, on the other hand you want
to stay focus, and on the third hand you want to listen to your customers ...
I really like the way they're approaching it with an open mind, working with
Q42 and asking broadly for feedback.

And it's an intriguing tool, too. One of the other impressive things about
this post was how well they spotlighted their customer Q42 and their
customers' client bransomcompany while also showing off their own product to
good advantage. I signed up, and I bet I'm not the only one :-)

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splatcollision
Interesting product... Time to run with new features and new uses. I'd love to
be in the position of having users figure out new uses for a product of mine.
What better way to have user-guided product development?

quplo: Your workflow for managing projects is quite excellent, signed up to
try it out!

plug: You all would probably also be interested in my Visual CSS3 Animation
Designer, available for prototype preview @
<http://editroom.splatcollision.com/>

*It's hosted on a single dyno (free) heroku plan, so forgive any slow load times...

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eps
This is how not to write a product plug in a disguise of insightful blog post.
Way _way_ too much marketing content, no concise summary at the top of what
happened and too long in general. Feels forced and disingenuous :|

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primigenus
Sorry you feel that way, eps. It's our product's blog and we wrote it because
we're genuinely facing this problem and wanted to share. There was no
intentional "marketing content", it wasn't forced, and it certainly isn't
disingenuous.

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cletus
There's obviously a market for hosted services, from barebones shared hosting
services like GoDaddy to VPS hosting like Linode and dedicated hosting.

There's also a market for specialized hosting like point-and click design with
Squarespace and Ruby on Rails hosting with Heroku (which recently sold for
>$200 million to Salesforce I might add).

My advice? Run with the idea. The barrier to entry is stupendously low. Resell
a VPS or even EC2 or even get your own dedicated server. If it doesn't work
out, no loss. If it does, it's relatively easy to scale up to more cost
effective solutions.

You may want to make your preview sites not usable as free hosting however.
Throttling requests, putting a banner at the top, limiting requests, something
like that.

~~~
metageek
One simple differentiator would be to require free preview sites to be hosted
under the quplo domain. That also lets previews get up more quickly, because
the user doesn't have to get the domain, configure DNS, etc.

Probably not enough by itself, though.

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dotBen
This is a VERY clever way to get people like me interested in finding out what
Quplo does given that I have no idea what Quplo is.

