In other words, what if I get hit by a bus? Right now that is an issue, in that I'm the only person involved in running Tarsnap -- the only mitigating factor is that (AWS power outages notwithstanding) the service basically runs itself, so if I do get hit by a bus there would be plenty of time for people to retrieve their data before Tarsnap was shut down.
How many months of FTE salary are you hoping to bank before you hire? What multiple of an FTE salary are you hoping to get to in monthly rev before you hire?
(I know it depends on the kind of FTE you're planning to hire, but I'm deliberately not putting a stick in the sand because I'm not trying to figure out how much you make).
How many months of FTE salary are you hoping to bank before you hire?
That's not really something I'm looking at.
What multiple of an FTE salary are you hoping to get to in monthly rev before you hire?
I want to have enough revenue that I can hire someone without reducing my "take-home profits" to an uncomfortably low level. So 2 FTE salaries, for some definition of "FTE salary", I guess. (And yes, I do realize that the idea of "wait until you can afford to pay someone before hiring them" is horribly out of style.)
It's more likely that I'll follow yegg's example of expanding initially via contract and part-time work, though.
2xFTE is aggressive; it presumes growth or steady revenue.
Well, a single month of 2xFTE wouldn't make me run out and hire someone... I'd need to be confident that it would continue. But presuming growth or steady revenue is pretty safe in the case of Tarsnap -- most of Tarsnap's revenue comes from storage costs, and in a typical month only about 10% of data gets deleted (and most of that is from machines which are uploading and deleting roughly equal amounts, presumably as part of an archive rotation process).
you seem relatively conservative about this stuff.
Within the limits implied by the fact that I'm running a startup company: Yes, I'm quite conservative in how I do things.
What kind of stuff would you contract out if money wasn't an object?
More testing. Kivaloo development. A GUI wrapper. I might throw some money at a web designer to see if they could make something I like more than the current site (I know you hate Tarsnap's web design, but like the picodollars, it does a good job of attracting the customers I want.) At some point, user support, but probably not yet (I worry that having someone else do user support would lead to me getting out of touch with the user community).
Probably more, but those are the bits which immediately come to mind.
I understand, disagree with, and respect the strategy you have with regards to segmenting out desirable customers, but think "picodollars" is a tragically bad way of doing it. :)
What would he A/B for? Quality of customer? Part of his point is that "picodollars" are warding off the kinds of customers he doesn't want to deal with.
