flashcfm

You're very welcome. And thank you too for taking the time to share your feedback.

Great question. We had an advantage of being one of the first to market with a shopping add-on. First of all, we had a solid product that our initial customers loved. With solid reviews on addons.mozilla.org and the chrome webstore, we started being featured more prominently on the add-on marketplaces. You really have to wake up every morning and think "what can I do/who can I talk to in order to get another customer?" Lifehacker ended up picking us as one of their Top 10 Must Have Browser Extensions which gave us our first big boost.

Regarding scaling....I've spent the past decade working with various cloud architectures. Everything we did was cloud based. I remember the days in previous startups where we would have to buy more servers and physically install them to scale. It was a nightmare. Services like Amazon EC2, RackSpace, RightScale have been a tremendous help for our business. As long as you have your software architecture right then dynamically scaling really becomes an afterthought. These services allow you to horizontally scale your application in a matter of minutes.

Now don't take this as we haven't had our own scaling problems, but I'm just sharing some of the things we've learned over the past 15 months.

It was easy since I had a mortgage and 4 mouths to feed. Seriously though, I think the key is to treat this like any other job. You have an office space in your house or offsite, and you get dressed in the morning and go to work at a certain time. If you are really pumped about your idea, you will find it hard to pull away from the job because you want to see it succeed so badly.

For some retailers we get paid with affiliate commissions, but we do not use that as a determining factor in which retailers to include. We attempt to provide the broadest coverage of retailers possible irrespective of whether we are paid or not.

This is my favorite question so far as it's one that I've struggled with in past ventures. Here's my take:

• As an entrepreneur, you absolutely must be 100% committed to success so you can deal with the inevitable setbacks. You have to be of the mindset that you can overcome any obstacle...that the breakthrough is just around the corner if you just keep trying things.
• What you're looking for along the way is key markers of validation. For PriceBlink as soon as we built the beta version, I realized that whenever I was shopping without it, I felt anxiety -- sort of like driving without a seatbelt. I knew then that we had created something special. Then when we started getting users, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. At that point we knew that it was just a matter of getting our product in front of more shoppers.
• As a responsible parent/spouse, you also can't drag your family into financial ruin. Personally, what I did when I started out was to agree with my wife on some milestones. We're willing to go x time without a paycheck. We're willing to spend $X of our savings. I recommend doing this ahead of time, because once you're in the thick of things, it's very difficult to objectively make these sorts of decisions.
• Now obviously, some ideas just turn out to be dead ends. Throwing in the towel is extremely difficult. If you have external investors, they'll tell you when they're done, but if you don't, here are some signs that you might need to cut bait: you can't find/keep a group (even a small group) of profitable customers; you don't have any new ideas for how to change your venture's trajectory; you start to dread going into work each day; given your metrics to-date, you can't come up with an economic model that can support the business (i.e. if you can't make money on a single customer, all the volume in the world isn't going to make a difference).

Hope that helps. Best of luck with your venture.