ccollins

In a marketplace model (e.g. ebay, airbnb, amazon, seamless / any food delivery), the take rate generally falls between 10%-20%.

Credit card processing fees are somewhere around 2% - 3%, so in a marketplace with all credit card transactions, impact on margin will be 6% - 30%.

If that marketplace can implement alternative payments (e.g. ACH, bitcoin, etc), impact on margin can get down below 5%. Not sure how the ebay / paypal integration influences this - would be interesting data.

One additional method to reduce margin for marketplaces is to allow transactions to occur offline and then invoice the seller based on a % of the total amount. Then your impact on margin will be exactly what your processing fees are.

There will be much different dynamics for different revenue models (e.g. as patio11 said, in SaaS, it is basically irrelevant).

So, I argue that % impact on margin is not a very useful metric unless you are comparing a specific revenue model in a narrow vertical.

Would you rather have $10B of margin with 50% going to processing fees or $1M of margin with 0% going to processing fees?

"Client IP address is forwarded to application as X-Forwarded-For" is the biggest news here.

Previously, it cost $100 per month to have access to the Client IP over SSL, so any sort of geo-location was out of the question.

Insane prices for arbitrary things are why I left Heroku a few months ago and decided to custom build my servers on Linode.

Great looking site and clear focus, but your Facebook Connect permission requirements caused me to give up before trying your product!

Getting past the home page requires connecting with facebook and providing the following info:

Your basic info

Your e-mail address

Your birthday

Your relationship status

Your photos

Friends' birthdays

Photos shared with you

This app may post on your behalf, including status updates, photos and more.

I suggest you allow me to browse more of your site while not logged in, limit the initial permission request to just my basic info + email, and/or provide alternate login method.

Geuis:

.004 / 100 == .00004 / 1

And

.004% = .00004

Cool - what are you using to edit the fonts? Any way I could help?

A couple of years ago, I spent Thanksgiving with a friend and the first thing he warned was, "My family does not drink alcohol!". Interesting... I am accustomed to intoxicated family parties, but on that specific Thanksgiving, 20 of us drank tea and ate turkey. It was pleasant.

After dinner, his father (a Doctor, along with 80% of the family) shared his views about alcohol, predicting that in one generation alcohol will be socially rejected the way tobacco is today because of how utterly destructive alcohol is to the human body.

Remember! Just 50 years ago, the majority of the United States had no problem with cigarettes.

I still drink, along with almost every adult I know, though I cannot help but think that my friend's dad is right.

Awesome offer & perfect timing - I emailed you and look forward to chatting!

Chris

Given a lump sum of cash and annual withdrawal of a certain percentage of that cash (3% per year is safe, 4% is pushing it, 5% is a sure way to lose your money), you would need the following amounts of money to pay yourself $50,000 per year:

$1.67 Million @ 3% (1 / .03 * 50,000)

$1.25 Million @ 4% (1 / .04 * 50,000)

$1.00 Million @ 5% (1 / .05 * 50,000)

Put another way, if you have X Million, how much could you safely withdraw each year at 3% per year?

$1M: $30k / year

$2M: $60k / year

$3M: $90k / year

$10M: $300k / year

Keep in mind you will pay tax on these figures (15% Long Term Capital Gains tax if you're lucky, or more if it's regular income). And this does not account for inflation, so assume the value of money gets cut in half every 25-30 years.

Thank you for bringing this up! Like you, I vehemently recoil when I spot a "This." in the wild.

To me, "This." == "I am incapable of formulating my own thoughts and therefore choose to fully agree with whatever that guy above me just said."

What are the biggest factors that increase the time suck? Amount of money you are raising, inexperience?

Conversely, what consistently decreases the amount of time spent closing a round?

Entering the Airbnb for dogs market might face competition from entrenched players, as a whois search shows that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky already owns dogbnb.com

From Mistake 10: "People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tarpit)". Would you please give an example or elaborate a little bit more on that?

I fear I may heading for the tarpit...