8th
Cheap vs. Stupid
At PhoneTag and any other business I am involved in I am always very attentive to the money out. I count every dollar spent as $10 since an investor that put that money in expects at least a 10x return on their money. So for example last night when I stayed in the Bay Area I stayed in my favorite cheap hotel, The Cardinal in Palo Alto, it is $80 a night but you do have to deal with a shared bathroom (they call it European style).
Now for stupid. When we started the company we used hosted Gmail. It met our needs and was affordable (free). At some point we decided to go to hosted MS Exchange. Great from the feature side but that $400 bill per month felt just a little too pricey. So we canceled it and went back to Gmail. While you can basically mimic most of the experience with Gmail, it is just not as clean of an integration especially with the blackberry. I have definitely lowered my productivity a little because of it. Since time is equally as important as money, this move was stupid.
Well we will stay on Gmail because we have now all hacked around enough to make it work, but for an annual savings of $5k per year it was not my best decision.