joshkaufman

I just submitted an application, and have been chatting with Myles, who has been very helpful and responsive.

Vouch is not able to proceed with my application because I run a bootstrapped business – zero funding and no debt. Vouch's current underwriting guidelines require at least $150,000 in funding, which seems odd.

I'm not sure why this is the case - if anything, my business has a much lower risk profile, since I have fewer counterparties, and don't have the exposures that would necessitate D&O, EPL, EB, or FD.

I hope this is something that Vouch will discuss with the reinsurer. I've been looking for a service like this for years now, and I'd like to vote with my dollars.

Happy to share anything you need - feel free to reach out whenever you like. My email is firstname at firstandlastname dot net, or @joshkaufman on Twitter.

Hi, Michi - congrats!

Not sure about your future plans, but there's a huge need for good collaborative writing/editing programs for traditional book publishing. Collaboration with developmental editors, copyeditors, agents, publishing staff, etc is both essential and extremely painful.

From the looks of it, the structure and output needs for book projects are less demanding than what you've already implemented, so it might be a worthwhile adjacency to explore.

Hope this helps.

There are three primary differences between your situation and Patrick's situation:

1. Patrick is a US citizen who lives and operates his businesses in Japan, which automatically makes accounting and filing taxes several orders of magnitude more difficult than filing taxes for a business that operates in the US.

2. Appointment Reminder, as an entity, operates in regulated industries, most notably medical care. That requires HIPPA compliance, which carries legal and financial risks if compliance is not accurately implemented, maintained, and insured. Patrick's conscientiousness in terms of business process is very much to his credit, and the consequences of Appointment Reminder going down, losing customer information, being hacked, etc are much higher vs. comparable issues with Pinboard.

3. Patrick engages with large companies as a consultant on a somewhat regular basis, with contract values that are substantial, and with counterparties that have legal departments that are also substantial. The level of legal and process overhead required to close these deals, execute on the project, and collect payment is comparably substantial.

In summary: you and Patrick have very different lives and run very different types of businesses. He's not "overcomplicating" his business operations - he's being smart and diligent in ways that benefit him greatly in terms of both revenue and risk mitigation.

Also, for what it's worth: I would highly recommend against operating as a sole proprietor. LLCs are inexpensive, easy to set up, easy to maintain, and mitigate significant personal legal/financial risks.

Insurance would also likely benefit you - a basic computer systems / PII policy would mitigate your (generally small) risk in this area: without insurance, getting sued by anyone even moderately persistent would likely put you out of business.

Think of it as the business equivalent of earthquake insurance: you can save a bit of time/effort/money by going without it, but as soon as an adverse event occurs, you REALLY wish you had it.

Likewise for accounting - we probably have similar businesses in terms of overall complexity (that is, not much), but Bench + my accountant save me so much time and effort it's silly to do accounting and bookkeeping myself any more.

Hope this helps. (Happy Pinboard customer.)

I'm the OP - surprised to see this at the top of HN today, but happy to post a quick update:

My wife and I have been happily married for ten years now. She loves her ring, and it has held up extremely well. (She just had the band resized, absolutely no issues with the stones.)

No one has ever thought it was anything other than a diamond ring, which includes several years of daily scrutiny from crazy New York City brides in her role as a bridal gown sales manager in a high-end atelier in Midtown Manhattan. Those who know about the stones think they're beautiful and love that there's a good alternative to diamond.

I stand by everything I said in this essay, and would 100% recommend moissanite to anyone who is (or will soon be) in the jewelry market.

I'd recommend checking into CreateSpace - I've done an enormous amount of research into print-on-demand services this year, and CreateSpace has the best total package (cost / ease-of-use / broad distribution) at the moment.

Lightning Source is also worth looking into for direct distribution, but if you intend to sell on Amazon, CreateSpace is the service to beat.

I've always been curious about Emacs, but I haven't made time to really dig into it. A resource like this will be very helpful. Looking forward to reading it!

Informed speculation based on the quotes in the article: it appears that Hachette accepted the "incentivized agency" terms that Simon & Schuster agreed to, which is very similar in structure to the terms Amazon offers for Kindle Direct Publishing.

These terms give publishers a strong incentive to keep book prices between certain thresholds (for KDP, higher margins if the price is set between $2.99 and $9.99), but Hachette has the ability to set prices outside of those thresholds as long as they're willing to accept lower margins.

Hachette gets nominal price control, and Amazon gets their preferred pricing because Hachette will get smacked in the pocketbook if they choose to exercise it.

Mountain views everywhere - the whole town is only a few miles from the mountains, similar to Boulder. Tons of parks, trails, mountain biking, etc. The city is very bike-friendly. Whitewater rafting is also close by on the Cache La Poudre River, which exits the mountains ~10 miles NW of the city. Public access boating available on Horsetooth Reservoir.

+1 on Fort Collins - relocated here five years ago. It's a fantastic town - many big city amenities for a small city. (For example: it has a ton of restaurants. I used to live in NYC, and many places in Fort Collins are comparable in quality.) Cost of living in town and in the surrounding area is very reasonable, and quality of life is great.

It's the other way around, actually: by law in the US and most countries worldwide, suppliers are free to set whatever prices and terms they like, but retailers have the final authority to set the price that's presented to the retail customer. Suppliers can not unilaterally dictate to retailers the final sales price the retail customer pays.

That's why "Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price" (usually abbreviated MRSP) is a thing. The manufacturer / supplier suggests a price, but the retailer makes the final call. The only recourse suppliers have to this is pulling distribution from that retailer entirely, as long as they apply the same policy to all retailers - companies like Apple and Bose make credible threats to do this to suppliers that violate their guidelines, which is why their prices are so consistent across retailers.

Otherwise, retailers have the final call on retail pricing unless they waive that right via negotiation: if they want to sell at a loss, or reduce their own margin to use lower prices as a marketing tool, they can. That's why Walmart and Target often sell bottles of Tide below cost - it's called a "loss leader" strategy, and it's very common as a way to attract new business.

Amazon used loss leader pricing on bestselling titles to establish the Kindle platform, which is a major reason why it's the dominant ebook platform now.

A big part of this dispute is that Hachette is demanding final authority on setting prices, and demanding that Amazon gives up the right to discount and use its ebooks as loss leaders - instead, they'd get a flat percentage (likely ~30%) of whatever Hachette decides to charge. This is a major part of what's now called "agency pricing," and the big 5 publishers and Apple colluded to force Amazon to adopt it several years ago. That's why the DOJ filed suit for antitrust / collusion / price fixing, and the publishers each lost or chose to settle.

As a condition of the judgement / settlement, publishers now have to renegotiate their contracts with Amazon. Amazon, justifiably, isn't willing to agree to agency pricing without major concessions. Hachette won't agree to standard retail non-agency pricing. Hence the impasse.

EDIT: also to clarify, wholesale non-agency pricing isn't "unprecedented in the book business." Barnes & Noble and independent retailers have operated on wholesale pricing for print books for decades. Otherwise, B&N wouldn't be able to place a "20% off" sticker on bestselling titles, or offer large discounts to move remaindered stock. Hachette is asking Amazon to agree to something no other book retailer has or would agree to. Retailers like Apple and B&N/Nook have agreed to agency pricing on ebooks in the hopes of shutting down Amazon's ability to discount, with the understanding that publishers were attempting to force Amazon to do the same. (Via collusion.)

The larger game is that Hachette (and other large publishers) are attempting to protect their hardcover print sales by inflating the price of ebooks, which makes them less attractive to readers. Ebooks are more profitable, but it's a more difficult market to control, so publishers are fighting Amazon and doing what they can to slow ebook adoption as much as possible. It's not a smart strategy, IMO, but that's what they're doing.