Niel... thanks so much for taking the time to respond in such detail to my post. It speaks highly of your leadership and the company in general. I definitely fully understand all your reasons for the sales process you have.

I guess for the bottom line is you could weed out a huge chunk of people simply by stating guidelines/restrictions/budgets etc that are required... both customers you simply don't want ever, or customers who may not be great fits at the time (ie, budget).

For example in my case... you're right... I'm not in your target yet because I'm not ready to spend $3k a month. Had your website said this was a target or min budget, I wouldn't have even bothered submitting the form. But at least I would have known when I meet X-criteria I can come back and be ready to rock n roll on what sounds like a very cool service. Instead, I go through this entire process only to sit around and wait for a response and jump through hoops that aren't going to take me anywhere anyway.

adblock is nice.. but it's not a solution for a better designed web.

Ads are a piece of the puzzle and super effective when done the right way. For example , I love the ads in the Tweetie desktop app. They are always highly relevant to me and I click on a very high percentage of them because I'm actually interested in what's being offered.

you are absolutely right! where can I sign up to pay to get rid of all the crap on the page??

yeah, that would be such an insane experience (that I hope to have some day)

Stuff like that happens all the time, it's insane!

Dan, maybe you didn't read my entire post. I've had them TAKE $1,000 OUT of my account. I've had the SHUT DOWN access to my account so that I could not make payments OR with withdraw money (of course, they allowed the account to continue to RECEIVE money so they could continue to hold that money hostage)... That sounds like the mafia to me!

Scott, thanks for the comment! Generally, these type of people wait a while before putting you on their marketing list, and then they generally don't tend to show back up at the events where they got your card.

But yes, giving them a friendly explanation *might* help :-P

I don\'t think it does, that would be really odd.

sure thing!

sounds exciting! look forward to seeing some cool apps come out of it.