Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault?
by raganwald on Saturday July 30, 2011 @09:09AM
(#2825680)
Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud.
This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.
Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.
Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.
This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.
Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.
Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.