monkeyspaw

I must thank you for giving me enough motivation to finally leave hacker news. I was listening to the new import this podcast, with ken reitz, wherein they were discussing the negativity of this community.

Now I'm going to try and go do something useful with my time, rather than get into obnoxious arguments.

I hope you're able to do the same as well.

Philosophically, I disagree: taxes are for the public necessity, not the public good. Roadways, fire/police, civil governance = necessity.

Granted, there is a lot of grey area. But the phrase "public good" means different things to different people. For those grey areas, private donations have been important. (see Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc.)

Can you elaborate? My understanding is that most merchant accounts are in the 2% + .45 range. Are you suggesting that merchant margins depend on a 1% margin?

I disagree, mostly because you presented your opinion as black and white.

Apple has, what, > 10k workers? If it cost them $100 billion to prevent one software worker from getting carpal tunnel, your statement suggests that cost should be born by Apple. Similarly, if it cost the cumulative GDP of the US to prevent N amount of pollution, your statement suggests that Apple should go bankrupt preventing that pollution.

Back in the real world, I suspect we generally agree. The problem, IMO, is that companies (and consumers) aren't forced to capture the hidden costs of injuries/pollution.

I just disagree with your black and white assessment. The laws of economics mean companies have to assign dollar values to human life and safety, as much as we dislike the feeling it gives us.

What does f2p stand for?

Although I'm cynical enough to not expect this, things could be partitioned into "grant access to people with no payment on file" and "need payment on file to download this app".

I'm not sure of your point. Cocaine does have legal uses, especially with ENT doctors/surgeons, who use it as an effective anaesthetic.

But the profit margins in the illegal drug market is largely because of the risk involved. Facing legal competition, which does not have to include that risk in its price, is effectively creating a market where legitimized producers have an extreme advantage.

I was going to upvote you until I saw your edit about downvoting. I believe you should state your mind without concern for arbitrary internet points. If you express concern over these points, it weakens your perspective, in my opinion, and I am much less likely to award you those useless points.

I frequently wonder - is Facebook allowed to say, "bing, you can crawl us. NewCompetitor, you cannot."

I feel like once a company allows public access by posting stuff on the web, they can specify terms, but not include/exclude groups specifically. (In a legal sense; I understand blocking systems that hammer servers but will respect robots.txt. IME bing is the worst offender -- they hammer my sites, send no traffic, but will stop if I specify in robots.txt.)

Does anyone have an opinion about "once public, I can crawl"?

IANAL, but that sounds either like you can't do all of those things together (the "and" conjunction), or you can't even read the website. After all, if you can't download it, you can't view it.

I"d like to add that I'm also OK with Facebook/Google/whomever making money off that. I think it's just a spectrum of perspective. One side is privacy concerns, the other is the win/win/win where I see ads relevant to me, facebook makes a little money [in exchange for providing a free service that I value], and the advertiser makes a sale for promoting a product that I want.

I don't know the right answer, but I think there's a balance to be struck.

One final thing - be resourceful. You have to call, email, visit, get referrals to, use linkedin (seriously, linkedin is great for b2b companies because people on Linkedin actually want to talk/connect with you!).

Doing the whole landing page "Field of Dreams" approach isn't going to work. Be resourceful (or, if you're into this term, hustle!).

You seem to be on the right path by saying you want to work with 10 of them. However, it doesn't sound like you're ready for your first customers, since you haven't talked with any of them!

While you think you have a great idea that will change the real estate business, the truth is that you don't know at all. You need to start talking to real estate agents. Send emails, phone calls, offer to take them to lunch, drop by their office. Talk about your idea (focusing on why they should care -- what will this do for them?). And -- importantly -- listen to their feedback.

Once you've had several in-depth conversations with 5-10 of these folks, you should know what they care about, and what the value of your product is to them. At that point, it should be easy to get your early partners to pay for the service -- after all, it was pretty much designed for them!

Also recommended: Steve Blanks "4 steps to the epiphany".

Referring to their decision to go print-only as "DRM" is inflammatory.

It's a book, dude. Not a piece of technology that allows publishers to control your access. It has it's limitations, which are fairly well known at this point in history.