A venture capital firm called today. It turns out that we’re not quite hot enough for VC investment yet.

VC: “So we typically invest in companies with at least $500,000 in quarterly revenues…”

Me: “HA!”

Though I won’t be buying a Porche and an eight ball tonight, the call was productive. The partner I talked to was friendly and informative. He said that we should get seed or angel rounds of funding then talk to VCs.

It was nice of them to call though. We must be doing something right if we look expensive enough for a reasonably well known VC to call us up unsolicited.

I do feel like it might be time for us to seek investment to take us to the next level. Having to worry about consulting and day jobs is like driving around with your parking brake on.

9 out of 10 doctors agree, the Newshutch ad placement sucks.

Clearly the main problem is that it takes up a lot of real estate that can’t be reclaimed by scrolling. After using Newshutch today I started to feel the same pain as everyone else. Your eyes scan the bottom of what you’re scrolling, but that static chunk stops you like a brick wall. The result is tension and awkwardness with how your eyes flow over the page.

We did test this before rolling it out, but we fell into the gap between testing a feature and really living with it. Newshutch’s strength is readability; anything that hinders readability must go.

That being said, we’d like to offset our hosting costs. Having two dedicated boxes isn’t cheap. Here are some questions we’d like you the users to help us with:

• Does anybody have experience running an app like Newshutch on a shared grid host like Media Temple grid server or Joyent Accelerator? Our bandwidth and storage needs are small. Newshutch’s overhead is in CPU cycles for parsing feeds and reading/writing them to the database.
• What about charging for an ad free version? What fee structure would be appropriate?
• What if we licensed customized versions of Newshutch?
• Doug and Nathan are always for hire. With more contract work we wouldn’t feel the pinch of hosting costs as much.
• Assuming that ads are a must, where should they go? Here are some options others have come up with:
  • In between every nth post, and at the end of a post with fewer unread items. Does anyone think it’s weird to drop our own ads in between the posts of a publisher’s feed?
  • Under the feed list on the left. The problem with this is that any “skyscraper” style ad wouldn’t work in “scroll panes independently” mode.
  • Only on the “welcome” page. The problem with this is that advertisers won’t pay as much for this kind of placement.
  • At the top of the page. I’d rather not, any opinions?

In the short term we’ll kill the big banner to free up some space so everyone can breathe again. Longer term we’ll take your ideas on how we can make ads not suck or do without them.