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We also opted for Pipedrive for our small sales team of three people. It's fairly intuitive for non-techie sales people and quick to get set up. With a bit of tweaking you can also get it to report on many metrics that are important to startups.

We left intercom a couple of months ago, and that was down to a pricing decision on their part.

I know of other companies that will now leave due the price changes. I'm sure they'll run the figures, but my guess is that not truly grandfathering in the existing prices for existing customers will bring in less revenue due to the number leaving.

Plus is it worth upsetting existing customers and advocates for the sake of a few dollars?

Regardless of the numbers involved, the product has really started to mature recently. We've been on the nReduce programme with them, and Clay has done some great stuff with Thetaboard. The Bootstrap Tour described in the blog post works well with the product. As Thetaboard starts to get a little more attention, I'm sure the numbers will become statistically significant.

It got traction because it worked simply with no config and was very cost effective in certain use cases.

I know it was used as a precursor to iMessage type eaperince to send 'texts' and images using only data, so was perfect for communicating across countries with no carrier charges.

They've been building the product as they go, in fact they are a team on nReduce themselves. Give them a prod tomorrow after the demo day, they're normally quite responsive.

We're doing MalinkoApp.com as part of nReduce. It's been amazing seeing ThetaBoard progress over the last 9 weeks - a lot of hard work has gone in to it, and Clay has been very responsive to comments and suggestions.

With real-time updates it becomes more of a player in the collaborative area - time to start putting it through it paces with our small team I think.

We've found that over the weeks the startups have got more comfortable using the nReduce platform to give more constructive feedback, and are not afraid to shy away from being direct. Also some of the teams involved have actually changed their plans when the rest of their 'support network' have firmly suggested alternative approaches.

There seems to be a focus on Transcendental Meditation. But that may be because they are good at publicising it.

Yes, there is definitely the middle ground.

Hide all but the most common actions on a page, but make it clear and consistent where the other actions will be found.

Although it is a nice feature, for me the most important Chrome feature is unifying the address and search box. Even non-technical people know to respond to a software update prompts, but the number of people I see (including normally quite tech savvy people) that still search for a url, or enter a search in the address field surprises me. OK, you could argue it is bowing down the lowest common denominator, but I believe it's a great feature that saves the frustration of people that just want to do go somewhere or find something on the web quickly.

At the very early stage it make perfect sense to just go for it and scratch that itch, but all too easy to then get burnout or bogged down in other aspects of the business. Good advice re mentors. If you're on your own, you do need to have those external sanity checks.