Essays

A cardboard sign and chartered plane doesn’t make an airlines, nor a video and signup form an app. But neither does a full-fledged airlines—complete with check-in counters, planes, pilots, and safety videos—guarantee success, nor the most polished app in the App Store.

“Ideas are worth nothing…

When Google launched their online office suite with Docs and Sheets in 2006, feature parity with Microsoft Office wasn't the focus. Neither was a price tag of free, or cross-platform support by virtue of being a web app. Instead, Google focused on the pain of emailing documents back and forth to…

Software’s not all that expensive when you buy one app for one person. It saves time and makes you money, and all’s well.

Then your team grows, and by the time you pay for G Suite, Slack, GitHub, and all your other work tools, software’s not such an innocent expense anymore. Pay $75 per person for…

Slack took over modern office communications partly because it's free to start. Any team can sign up for Slack and use all of its core features for free. That's how it slowly got adopted in companies from the bottom up, as smaller teams joined Slack, then got their wider division to start using it…

It starts with a shiny new app in beta, free while you try it out. It sticks, and its paid plans make sense. You happily upgrade and bring your team onboard.

Then one day you get an email about amazing new features and their associated rise in price, or add another team member and notice the price…

HubSpot starts out cheap—or free, if you use its CRM. But what would your team pay each month if you rolled it out across your company and used its marketing tools extensively?

Capiche is on a mission to make software prices more transparent, to help you know what software really costs other teams…

Email seems impossible to tame. It’s everything: your online address, the bit of identifiable data you use to sign up for apps, apply for jobs, work with clients and colleagues, message friends, follow newsletters, and on and on the list goes. And as such, your inbox isn’t just a list of unread…

The best time to get software discounts is when you first start your business—and to get those discounts, you need to sign up with the best deal. $1,000 off AWS or 30% off HubSpot might sound great, until you realize you could get $100,000 in AWS credit or 90% off your first year of HubSpot with the…

For decades, a stark distinction existed between enterprise software (targeting Fortune 2000 companies) and the rest of business software (targeting mid-market and SMB).

SMB could be a path to the enterprise, but the categories were vastly different. Different buyer personas, different brand goals…