<story><title>What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call</title><url>http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcenedella</author><text>I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this case, obviously we’re a third party service provider so this really has nothing to do with the President’s team’s ability to execute.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed a reflection of the President&amp;#x27;s team&amp;#x27;s ability to execute when they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will reflect well on their boss and organization.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-call-after-state-of-the-union-156672.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.politico.com&amp;#x2F;politico44&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;obama-doing-ofa-c...&lt;/a&gt; -- so dropping this order in the lap of a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will happen.&lt;p&gt;I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the-pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be excusable.&lt;p&gt;But these are not normal circumstances.&lt;p&gt;When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed. No questions asked.&lt;p&gt;If you can&amp;#x27;t guarantee that, then don&amp;#x27;t use that vendor, don&amp;#x27;t do the event as a conference call, or don&amp;#x27;t do the event.&lt;p&gt;Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and will be costly.&lt;p&gt;The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.</text></comment>
<story><title>What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call</title><url>http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>biot</author><text>If I were their VP of Engineering, the questions jmilloy asked would be top of mind for a post mortem.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d also raise the issue of whether the $9.99 all-you-can-eat plan should have a specific limit in terms of absolute number of live connections. From their pricing page, it looks like OFA could have just used the Basic (free) plan. Even still, they will never recoup their costs from this one call even if OFA remains a $9.99&amp;#x2F;month subscriber for a decade. If &amp;quot;We worked all weekend...&amp;quot; means two engineers worked 4 hours Saturday and 4 hours Sunday, that&amp;#x27;s 8 hours&amp;#x2F;engineer * 2 engineers * $100&amp;#x2F;hour = $1600 of time was spent. That&amp;#x27;s 13 years at $10&amp;#x2F;month, not even factoring in infrastructure or bandwidth costs from the call itself. And I&amp;#x27;m guessing that estimate is an order of magnitude less than the actual time spent. If I were a potential customer evaluating providers, I would be scared off by your current offer of what appears to be unlimited usage and unlimited priority support for $10&amp;#x2F;month as I&amp;#x27;d have serious doubts of your ability to remain in business a year from now.&lt;p&gt;No doubt the effort invested in preparation for the OFA call will pay dividends for future scalability, but I doubt the people at OFA would have blinked an eye if you told them that there&amp;#x27;s a $5 CPM rate for connections beyond the first 100. 140K connections would have been a paltry $700. Obviously, only an analysis of your customer usage patterns would indicate whether you&amp;#x27;d impact any serious customers if the basic plan was capped at 100 simultaneous live listeners, with additional tiers for higher peak use. Check out PubNub&amp;#x27;s pricing model for peak connections as this model makes financial sense: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pubnub.com/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pubnub.com&amp;#x2F;pricing&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>