adambratt

Also very curious to see what you've built as I'm building something similar right now. Would you mind sending a link to [email protected]?

Your website is honestly really confusing. The design is nice and clean but the messaging is really lacking. I've ran multiple small businesses and I have no idea what "Zero agent rental forever" would ever mean to a business owner. I also had no idea what IVR meant and I've actually built automated message systems on Twilio.

Are you providing me the agents or do I have to supply themselves? It looks like you're just the software but once again the wording/copy made things incredibly confusing.

Your messaging should reflect that you provide easy to use call center software. If you're competing mainly on price then the "pay only for the calls you make" should be a tagline somewhere... that's a powerful message but I don't see it anywhere on the site.

I also don't really like the design on your features pages..at first I thought they were lists of blog posts. There's so much spacing with big faded images that don't make it easy to see the product. Not to mention you're peppering me with that free trial button when I really just want to read what each feature does...and then you could throw me the CTA at the end of the page if I liked this feature.

Minecraft Youtubers with over 500,000 subscribers were routinely making $15k for a 10 minute video a couple years ago. Probably higher now.

Yes, but I'm guessing they will open up the currency so that 3rd party servers can use it rather than having to deal with payments on their own.

Hopefully it will help legitimize a lot of the current server networks.

There's a few reasons why they're doing this.

My little brother ran one of the top 10 Minecraft servers a couple years ago. On a good day, he'd average 1000 players online during US hours. His server had a bunch of minigames with the most popular ones being a clone of Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefield in Minecraft.

This was monetized on the backend by charging players money for in-game items. It was fairly regular for a player on his server to pay $100+ to have access to an in-game gun or other virtual item he'd created on his server. I won't say how much he was making but it definitely was enough to pay several thousand dollars in monthly server bills and $3-5k/month to Youtubers who would drive traffic to the server.

The top 3 servers were pulling well into 7 figures a year each for virtual items that would often disappear or for a kit loadout in a minigame that would be gone the next month. A lot of these guys churned through user bases pretty quickly but it didn't stop the endless flow of 13 year olds with their parents credit card. None of them offered support options and there wasn't really a way to get a refund after you'd spent $100 on a virtual kit on a 3rd party server mod.

I think part of the reason Microsoft is doing this is to regulate the number of angry calls they were getting by parents of kids who spent way too much money on servers that Microsoft had no control over. Not to mention this will let them get a scoop of what I'd estimate to be a side income stream of at least $200m/year in revenue through 3rd party servers.

There's a great article on it that I'm struggling to find. But essentially, the Shazam app and related apps built on their tech are used as a massive A/B testing tool now by artists. Roll out 3 versions of the same song to 3 similar cities in the Midwest and see where it gets the most shazam lookups.

If I recall correctly a few years back they were doing $100m a year by basically being able to give everyone in the music industry insight into what's the most popular and upcoming songs in every major city.

However, with the popularity of Spotify I'm guessing they're losing a lot of market share in the mass music metrics space.

Exactly, it's really easy to look at the consumer value of 4sq and shrug them off without realizing their database has incredibly valuable data.

Another similar company who is making a ton of money off data on the backend is Shazam.

Aside from the fact that they are a data company, not a fund... While what they are doing is completely legal it's safer for the company investing off of data to be separate from the company creating the data. Less conflicts of interest in the event it eventually becomes a legal issue.

They still get millions of location updates every 15 minutes. I don't remember the exact number as it has been a couple years since I talked with people using their data but it is much much higher than you would expect.

They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background. They've also built APIs into ad networks that ping their location database with coordinates millions of times a day to find relevant ads. There's thousands of apps using ad networks that funnel location data back to 4sq.

Techies may have abandoned them, but they still have a ton of middle America thinking that 4sq is cool. My mom for example.

On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population.

Foursquare honestly has some of the best user location data you can buy on the market.

The only companies out there with better historical data are Facebook, Apple, and Google. And as far as I know, I can't call them up and start buying from them within a few weeks.

I've seen hedge funds right now making millions off of Foursquare's data as they can build algorithms around it quite easily and there's plenty of history to backtest off of. The great part is that Foursquare's previous money maker was selling their places database so they've already done a great job mapping GPS coordinates to businesses and it's pretty easy to map that further to a ticker symbol. Perfect for quants.

By combining Foursquare data with anonymized credit card data from Intuit or Yodlee... you've got the ability to predict retail sales on a DAILY basis rather than on a quarterly basis. You might even be able to a better job than that actual business in predicting their growth if you've got a whole team of quants working on creating the data models.

This is the start of a shift from the market at large relying on quarterly earnings for these types of companies and instead being able to track performance on a daily level. As far as I can tell, there's nothing companies can do to stop this either.

They don't need to wait for the clients to get rich. Fidelity or Schwabb will buy them and then start to upsell the Robinhood users into other financial programs.