Good points, but has any VC in history actually underpinned growth from 100 to 100,000 customers in a month? Users, perhaps, but users are different creatures to customers.
What's the value of that kind of user growth? It very much depends on the quality of the user, and the startup's ability to convert users to customers. The Techcrunch effect might give you rapid user growth, but are these the right kind of users for the business? Maybe. Or maybe not.
But for the short term story, the VCs love 'user growth', and let's not worry too much about the detail, right?
The problem with taking the VC dollar is that you also need to take their metrics and KPIs. I can think of no better KPI in business than average customer lifetime value, but I doubt most VCs could care less about that, as it's a long-term KPI. It is the short-term vanity / hype metrics ('user growth' being a good example) that they're more interested in. They want to be in and out within a relatively short timeframe.
Explosive growth is all well and good, but as ever we're overly focused on user / customer acquisition, and not with retention, which is far more profitable over the long term. A healthy business concentrates on the latter, and not just the former. For VCs, it seems to be the other way around, concerned as they are with exit strategy.
A blog will help with SEO and provide fodder for your social media feeds. Consider the kind of content you'd create. The question to ask is what would appeal to your target audience (I'd avoid making the blog all about your product). If time is tight then, curation beats creation.
I like the idea of one price fits all product. You should try to bill annually, but experiment with sales psychology (you could price it monthly, for example).
Imgur - the tools are so useful. I wanted to support it, as much as I wanted the extra features I ended up paying for. Much to learn. That lovely right click menu...
You're right about prioritising how it works over how it looks. The GUI stuff is fun, and you will no doubt iterate the design as you go along.
Plenty of good ideas there. Are you aiming at the more serious photographer? You could ban iPhone pics!
I think it's key to understand what people will pay for, and where the gaps are on competitor sites. You'll have more clue than me about all that.
I used to pay for Flickr, but I lapsed and it felt like a shakedown to have to pay to be able to access my pictures. Left a bad taste. I understand the model, but between that and all of the Yahoo integration I got fed up with it.
However I now use Imgur a lot and recently went 'Pro', though it is mainly for screenshots and image hosting, as opposed to decent quality photos.
The key, in terms of marketing, is to either have a brilliant story or brilliant content (or both). If you have the former then the latter follows naturally. Your content is largely the photos, but I think you should take some ownership over content creation - a blog is a no brainer and could be crucial for your SEO and social efforts.
There are plenty of things you can do on the user experience front, though you've made a great start on that score. The detail matters. For example, I'd use synonyms on the homepage for 'fantastic image', just to mix it up.
The ranking algorithm is always a fun thing to work out, and experiment with.
I'm in the UK but quite happy to pay for something in dollars. I don't think it works quite so well the other way around. Ultimately Stripe needs to build out its features, unless there is a hack of some kind to look into (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-paid-memberships-p...).
It's a very saturated market. Have you got a clear plan of attack, as far as the marketing goes?
1. The article clearly isn't an attack on HTML5 itself, but of designers who happen to be building HTML5 sites with a lack of concern for the user experience. The gap between design and UX has hugely narrowed in the past decade, and I don't want to see it open up again. It is a plea of sorts, and I apologise if I've mislabelled the headline.
2. The article is a response to the many posts I see that hold up these sites as being "inspirational examples of HTML5 design". I'm afraid that I don't think many of these sites are inspiring, given the UX issues. And yes, they could have been built in HTML4, but they're using HTML5 / CSS3. Hence the headline, though no doubt I could have chosen a clearer one.
3. Yes, our site has all manner of issues, though I've yet to see it in a compendium of 'inspirational' sites. The roll-up is there because sometimes business goals sometimes kick UX goals in the face. The roll-up should not appear immediately and should not obscure all of the screen (please suggest a more elegant solution).