My first customer came from my own personal network as well.
The first customer that did _not_ come from my personal network was a result of posting to app directories such as feedmyapp.com and the like.
The best advice I can give on signing and keeping your first customer is to _make them happy_. Be nice. Crack jokes. When they call or email you, respond immediately. Your first customers are really important because they're vetting your business model in addition to trying your product.
Accept/understand that, as you observe your first customers interacting with your product, you're going to have to make changes. Make them quickly and reasonably.
Every company is unique, but that's how I found and retained my first customers.
I'm not a design genius-- but when I saw Gap's new logo I think I knew what they were going for, and imho I doubt it was created haphazardly. The new logo is exemplary of the transition of "best practice" design principles from print to electronic media.
They unabashedly violated two rules of logo and print media design, and it's so blatant that I can't believe it was an accident. Their logo features a gradient (print-media epic fail), and two low-contrast overlapping colors, the P and the background square (also a print-media epic fail).
I hope that the executives do not knee-jerk a reaction and demand a logo redesign, but instead play out the campaign and see how it pans out. I'm not convinced it was a mistake.
Perhaps the real redesign wasn't the logo, but their website and online presence?
2 days late; not sure if you'll still get a chance to read this. But, I'll bite.
As someone who's hired (good and bad) engineers in both UI/UX and back-end disciplines, my first impression of it was "Yeah, it's not pretty, but he does not allege to be a designer." At that point, I checked out the source code. It was not spectacular, but he did communicate an working grasp of the technology he professed to understand.
If this resume was judged in a biased lean towards UI/UX, my opinion is that you'd be passing up a potentially hard-working and dedicated employee. With a little help from a designer, this guy could possibly do great things.
Many engineers are not designers, and should not be judged as such. Constructive criticism is more helpful here than lambasting them for not adhering to your personal standards of UX.
CKEditor and TinyMCE have solved a very difficult problem in extremely elegant ways; their developers deserve more respect than wishing their projects death.
A big problem is that contentEditable has never been part of an official spec until now (HTML5). My fingers are crossed that we'll see some improvements over the next few years.
Without estimating the traffic of the author's site, I still find his argument valid.
I've employed many of the tactics he describes and have achieved >15 M/s of dynamic content through MySQL. Not Facebook, but it was fast and scalable for the market my app was geared towards.
My competitors (uservoice.com, ideascale.com, and a few others) charge a similar base fee, but they both have a tier-based pricing structure. I'm shooting for more of an a-la-carte model that lets my customers choose which features they want.
If, after a few months or so, I find that my pricing is too high, it's a lot easier to lower prices than raise them:).
Possibly, but Google Docs doesn't write in HTML anymore. Advanced positioning and stuff like tab stops don't translate easily into CSS, so even if they _did_ open source the editor, the final HTML will look different than what it did in the editor.
Example: create a document with two lines of tab-stopped text with varying lengths, and then export to HTML.