FxSound
Boosts sound quality, volume and bass on your PC.
Was previously using Shopify and felt that the lack of control for the design of the process and the additional steps was hurting our conversion rate. The development process ended up taking much longer than expected. The lesson there is to outsource work that's unfamiliar to our dev team and not core to our value add.
There were some contractual restrictions to how I could reinvest profits that was restricting our capacity to grow. This along with some conflict with the cofounder led me to purchasing out his shares along with my brother's. The lesson here is that life is a hell of a lot easier with full control. Going to be very careful about sharing equity going forward.
Up until this point I hadn't been able to give myself fully to my work without burning out. I had put the company on autopilot and was content to bringing in cash until people stopped buying our software.
During a two month trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand I come to realize that I hadn't put in the necessary work to properly process the grief and trauma from my parents' passing and childhood. From here I begin taking better care of myself and go deep into practicing mindfulness. I realized that I was leaving upside on the table, both personally and professionally. I decide to come back in full-time to help launch FxSound 2 on a subscription model.
I make the one of the hardest decisions of my life and fire my dad's cofounder and best friend. Our decision making and execution as a company simply wasn't at a high level, so I acted. The decision itself was the right one, but my execution was poor. Getting fired should never be a surprise, and in this case it was. This resulted in some bad blood between us and a bunch of wasted time on money on legal nonsense.
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"Getting fired should never be a surprise..."
I think it was Jack Welch or someone like that who said that and it has been a great guiding principle in my career too. There should be mechanisms in place to help employees evaluate their own performance and know when it drops to "firing levels" so they can take action before YOU do!
Hope the bad blood has been cleared though, nobody needs that following them around for years after the fact!
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Nice. How has it guided your career?
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One way is how it inspired me to create a point system based on what I wanted my field employees to do or not do. If you did what was required you scored points, if you failed you lost points. When points fell below a given threshold there were consequences and repeat offenders were fired. Since the point system was public to all employees, it was never a surprise to anyone whenever someone got fired!
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Previously DFX Audio Enhancer, we release the new FxSound software along with a complete rebrand. The official launch breaks our previous single day sales record. In hindsight, I wished I had put more thought then into the option of moving from a one-time purchase to a subscription model. I dismissed it as I underestimated our capacity to continually iterate on the product.
My dad had been the DSP engineer on the team, and with his passing the core of technical piece of the software became a bit of a black box. We've since filled that hole, but at the time of developing FxSound 1, I didn't consider finding another DSP engineer a realistic option given our cash flow. I think I was being too pessimistic.
Both of my parents die tragically and unexpectedly and my brother and I each inherit 1/3 of my dad's small software company. I had been working a marketing job in San Francisco, but quit soon after to help out with FxSound in a part-time role. I had never planned on joining the company, but I felt there was some value I could add.
4 Comments
I totally agree with you. One mention though. To do that, you need to identify a partner you can fully trust, a partner that can provide you with the right technology and manpower to allow you to successfully outsource the parts of your business you do not necessarily feel comfortable handling. PayPro Global offers a complete all-in-one solution for selling SaaS, software and digital goods, providing you with multiple payment methods and currencies, tax & fraud management, and shopping cart customizations. The point I am making is that if in other cases you need to combine systems and solutions to finally get what your business needs, with PayPro Global, there is no need for that. You already have everything you need in one place.
I plan on using Stripe for my future projects as well. What exactly caused the development process to take longer than expected, was it Stripe issues or internal issues (or both)?
Probably a combination of both. Stripe gives you a lot of control and freedom, but if you're just trying to get something up and running as quickly as possible then FastSpring seems like a good option depending on your products price (they have high transaction fees for transactions <$10)
Many thanks for the insight, will definitely check out FastSpring 👍