akcreek

As a follow-up, in case anyone else finds themselves in this position. I was never able to create a FB account for myself, but a member of our team was able to use their existing personal FB account to create a company page. From there, they signed the account up for Meta for Business.

Once you have a Meta for Business account, you can apply for Brands Rights Protection, assuming you have a registered trademark. Our application was approved quickly.

This opens up a set of tools to search for impostors, infringers, etc., and a bulk report option. This is significantly quicker than using the public-facing trademark and copyright reporting forms. Within a couple of days, all imposter pages were removed across FB and Instagram.

They also have a paid service called Meta Verified for Business. This service promises even quicker action on impostors, but there is a waitlist right now, so we couldn't try it. The Brands Rights Protection ultimately fixed our issue, for now at least.

It's so depressing to think that might be the answer here!

We have one (or more) people posting ads impersonating us hiring translators on Upwork and in Facebook groups. The scam seems to be they "hire" the person, give them work, and then never pay them.

Having zero cost of goods sold makes it possible to undercut on prices and pay for all your acquisition and still make a buck. Doesn't seem scalable or sustainable, but it has been a real nuisance for us. Translators are contacting us for their payment...

Upwork has not been willing to help us at all. They pull the ads quickly so by the time support clicks the link, the ad is down. They act as if it didn't happen if the link doesn't still work. Crazy.

There is a lot of fraud out there. Anything you can imagine and then quite a bit you can't if you don't spend your time thinking about how to screw others.

It definitely confuses our customers. We fairly regularly receive unpleasant tickets asking where their order is. Once we dig in we often find they did not order with us, but with a competitor who they thought was us.

So still an LLC, but it is taxed like an S-Corp when this election is made. This allows an owner working in the business to be an employee and take a reasonable salary. W2 income is subject to FICA taxes, but all the other profits in the business pass through to the owner as usual for an LLC, but aren't subject self employment tax or FICA. You still pay regular income tax though. This is all at a federal level.

It's definitely tough to articulate. It's basically the same concept as progressive taxation in the US as your rate increases on a per dollar basis when moving through the brackets. Though you are going the other direction and discounting deeper as you move through the brackets!

It seems to be a subject that trips a lot of people up. It's really common to see people talk about their marginal tax rate as if it is their effective tax rate. "I pay 24% in taxes and make $175K/year" - Not really though, you paid 24% on ~$4K of income, but 10% on the first $19,750, 12% on the income from $19,751 to $80,250, etc. Your marginal tax rate is 24% as that's what you'll pay on the next dollar, but your effective tax rate on all income earned was actually 14% (or whatever it actually is, just a loose example).

In your case, the discount is so significant that I'd think you'd want to showcase that. Maybe a slider to adjust the number of users and show the dollar amount of the discount as well as the total percent saved, which will continually grow as you increase the bucket of users in that lowest bracket?

Or in that FAQ you could give an example of a 300 person workspace and show how the calculation pencils out. Having to do math to figure out the ballpark cost of the product isn't great though, so if the info is public (ie you don't have to contact sales) then you should probably make it super easy to get to.

Just some ideas. You never know, everyone else might get it right away and I could have just been slow on it. My brain definitely went to doing rough math and thinking about how weird the pricing is at different user counts though!

Gotcha, so the lower pricing applies to the incremental users. I didn't get that from reviewing the pricing page.

Curious what the thinking is with the steep volume discounts? It is cheaper to have 251 users than it is to have any number between 41 and 250.

You run into some weird pricing this way. For example, 250 users on the pro plan is $1,000/mo while 251 is $220.88.

I use email validation via MailGun for exactly this purpose with a productized service business. If we don't have a good email, then we can't deliver the service once complete. That leads to angry customers, even if the issue was a typo when they created the account. Easier to try and catch it during signup rather than at the time of delivery when emails start bouncing and you have no way to get ahold of the person.

That would be markup, margin can't be over 100%.