arthurdent

Groupon doesn't care a ton since they have boatloads of money, and they'll feel like they HAVE to take a shot since "China's a huge and growing market, blah blah blah" but it'll really be chalked up as a fat expense with not much benefit if any to the company.

Here's why China's different:

China, by and large, doesn't live for rampant consumerism. Walk the streets of Beijing or Shanghai (the 2 cities where this is most likely to matter in China) and you'll see that most shops are convenience stores and dingy eateries trying to eke out a living selling 2RMB ice cream pops and water, NOT "skydiving lessons! pottery classes! cosmetic dental procedures! maybe if i can drive some loss leader business in and call it an advertising cost, it'll be a good long run investment!"

Beijing and China are big cities, but most of the citizenry inhabit a tiny subset of the city. People go YEARS without venturing beyond a 1 mile radius of where they live. They rarely travel to other parts of the city to "try a new restaurant" or "hey, let's do pilates". For most people in China, everything they need is already there, so a groupon for something across town isn't appealing (most stuff on groupon isn't in close proximity to my house).

That said, even though most people are like this, even if some small %age of the population cares, (small %age) * (shit ton of people) == possibly profitable for Groupon.

China does have a lot of money and growing consumerism, but the gini coefficient is absurd. The median monthly income in Beijing is < 600 RMB (<USD$1000). People who have money can buy whatever they want and are relatively price insensitive.

Gift certificate and coupons aren't widely used in China. They exist, but they haven't been a fixture in the consumer landscape the way they have been in the US. Prices in China are a suggestion, and aren't even always written. The price for a widget is a function of how much the vendor likes you, the time of day, if the shop has to pay rent soon, and only sometimes, the actual cost to produce it.

I'm not going to speculate on counterfeit coupons as a problem, but I can't imagine that will help the cause.

This will fail because the intersection of businesses who want to use groupon + consumers who care about groupon is smaller than you'd guess for a huge population, buying and travel habits aren't conducive to the groupon model, there will be distrust of the brand and discount mechanism.

its sort of an "all your eggs in one basket" strategy, but if you're going to put all your eggs in any particular basket and you're good at what you do, you're as good a bet as any (and you can make sure your investment manager isn't slacking)

2. it depends what you mean by "risk". arguments claiming bond allocation in your portfolio are less "risky" describe risk as "volatility of returns", which in finance are measured over shorter intervals than 40 years.

patrick is specifically accepting short term volatility in return for the higher EV of returns.

the marketplace prices debt instruments (especially US treasury issued) over the long term with cheaper expectations for returns specifically because it has lower variance of returns.

When I read your reply, I see, I'm awesome. I know so much about what you want to know that I can't even figure out to start. Oh btw, how cool am I?

I've tried a few other services for my properties, but the UI tends to be really sloppy for other "apply online" web services. You need to make it easy for me to use and inviting for my potential tenants.

One thing that would make me almost certain to try it is if you could bundle an affordable credit check into the application process. Any plans for something like that?

I'd be interested in helping beta test this if you have a need for that.

I have a single investor, so you could imagine that he's the web startup equivalent of an angel or venture capitalist. He's extremely knowledgeable about markets, and we keep open lines of communication about what I'm doing. He trusts that I'm a good founder and that I'm doing my best to capitalize on market opportunities, but he never tells me what to do. However, if I want his advice or access to his resources, he's happy to share.

It isn't HFT in the traditional sense (or maybe not any sense), but I do tend to prefer opportunities that are quantitative in nature and spend a lot of time programming.

Right now I'm making laughably small amounts of money (non-negative, but insufficient to support me), but I'm hoping that that will change soon. Again, very much like a startup -- I take a hit on the salary and stability because I want increased exposure to the success upside. And like a startup, my investor(s) win if I win.

However, I've recently seen an opportunity to join another such "startup" (currently 2 guys) and I'm considering that, which might be the death of my own little trading startup.

I have to wear a lot of hats, am constantly learning new things, get frequent feedback that I have to use to refine my product, can't do everything so I have to choose what things I'm going to spend effort on and what things can be suboptimal. Release early and release often and I'm playing against better funded often slower moving incumbents.

Not that he's wrong, but just an example of how he comes off as abrasive. The "so please don't think that any idea you send is really that important" just serves to belittle everyone else's ideas (while his ideas are "killer").

The startup community generally embraces the "execution is really important" mantra, so just stop it at "i can't sign any NDAs or anything, i invest in a lot of companies"

Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by "build[ing] tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better, which I believed required people to more closely work with and understand their data."

A startup can't implement every feature perfectly, and will ultimately have to make choices without knowing which was the "right" one.

People worry a lot about [achieve task X] optimally, when really its probably fine to just [achieve task X] somehow/eventually.

For example, people read mountains of research to fine tune their workouts. Guys who work on farms do fine without. "Lift heavy things. Repeat." will make you strong enough that you shouldn't have to overthink the method you choose. Don't overthink the social skills thing either. Have fun. Repeat. Drink and party and dance and you'll get better at it.

18 months ago I was at a "high paying job" by most standards. I worked 45 hours a week, had great coworkers, and even generally enjoyed my work.

I left because a regular job gets in the way doing other things that are important to me: enjoying the sun in the middle of the day, not working on tuesday if i don't feel like it, traveling for 3 weeks at a time, etc.

Being incredibly rich or owning shiny toys isn't nearly as important to me as scheduling freedom (and hopefully eventually location independence), so it wasn't for me.

Sure, it'd be great if I somehow had a big payout for doing what I'm doing now, but its not even in the top 5 factors for why I chose to pursue "the startup route".

No amount of encouragement or advice from others who have left their jobs will help you decide if its the right choice for you. You have to dig deep, figure out what you ACTUALLY want, then you can decide if leaving the day job is right for you.

bcc was one of the steps on the way to me realizing that building the site is almost none of the business.

as a friendly and encouraging wager, i submit that you can't or won't get a bcc clone business with >$500 revenues/mo.

1. Its NOT an Authorize vs Braintree issue. Your gateway doesn't care at all. It has everything to do with your Merchant Service Provider.

2. Different merchant service providers have different rules. For reference, Cybersource (a Merchant Service Provider, and Authorize.net's parent company) does not allow you to take a credit card payment at the beginning of a software trial period. They require you to give the trial, THEN ask for the cc info and begin the recurring payments immediately after taking the information.

Cybersource claims that this is what they are supposed to do: when you take cc info online to charge, you pass that information to visa/mastercard/whatever credit card company, who then authorizes the transaction. There is an auth code associated with this transaction, and the auth code expires eventually.

They've told me that the rules from visa/mastercard are fairly clear that you're supposed to charge once you take the info, but some Merchant Service Providers aren't very strict on that.

tldr: Cybersource won't let you take credit card info until you charge the card. You'll have to find a different MSP.

if you think this is incorrect and switching to braintree solves this problem, please explain further.

its really a simple message: write bad code, and you might pay for it later. sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.

"technical debt" as a term isn't intended to capture a specific risk/reward payout structure. It doesn't need clarification in this vein.

Advice: First, read revorad's list. I basically found as many HN posts as I could on the topic. They didn't help me come to a decision at all, but they gave me some background information on the topic. They weren't helpful for making a decision because for the most part it seems like a lot of people just said "I did X and I'm happy with the solution".

There seems to be a lot of pricing misinformation on the topic. The threads contain a good deal of "Braintree is the best and works with customers" AND "Braintree is expensive and hard to work with".

My experience: I went with Authorize.net. It was easy to set up my account and I had my account in 4 hours after an online application process. I found shopping for the best pricing difficult because I really don't have a good handle on how much (if any) business I'll be doing and the pricing structure's seem to lack transparency. I got really close to spending 2 days researching and I'd rather just take the easy solution now and work on the app.

I think its easy to get mired in "finding the ideal solution" especially at this juncture, but its more important to find a good enough solution that lets you move on.

This really spoke to me when I was a kid. Young me was really attached to the notion of creating your own destiny and taking responsibility for your own successes and failures. Back then, felt like a lot of people were just big fat whiners.

Life's too short to work with jerks. Making a point to surround yourself with quality people will enrich your life. I sometimes forget this and almost always regret it.

This really speaks to me. For a long time it was just a really obvious overrepeated cliche to me. Then recently I've been going through a rough patch with my startup, and hearing/reading it from other people has become critical to my motivation to keep going forward.

With stability, money in the bank, and a dream, it was easy to say "I'll be happy even if i try and fail, but i don't want to live with not trying; wondering will eat me up."

All of the sudden, trying and failing, it became really hard to see how failure was a better path. Hearing other people say it reminds me of why I wanted to take the risk.

apples to pinecones.

outsourcing isn't any different than any other task where you rely on other people. just like traditional in-house employment, dating, personal relationships, or anything where you deal with someone else, working with bad people sucks. the key to a good experience is finding good people.

published accounts probably suffer a negative bias because people who get what they want usually don't go out of their way to post "i outsourced and it was exactly as advertised" articles, while people who don't get what they want like to whine and punish the people they worked with.

i suspect a large percentage of people who are outsourcing dev are: 1. incapable of assessing the quality of their outsourcees, so they end up hiring crap ; 2. cheap bastards trying to do work on the cheap, so they end up hiring crap.

like in any other trade, find good people, and incentivize them to keep playing nice with you.

in my experience, the most important thing to screen for is reliability. i just make a rule to not work with flakes, and i try to make sure my devs are happy.

a lot of people outsource because they can't code. if you can't code, you probably can't tell if your dev can code. if you're in that position, you should find someone to help you evaluate candidates, or you might just get screwed.

friend got me the total immersion dvd, there's a series of exercises that help you focus on balanced weight distribution in the water, full body rotation for more efficient swimming motion and easier breathing, etc. the exercises slowly work you into a easy freestyle. i went from basically unable to swim 4 laps to .75km swim in open water in about 6 weeks.

not really anything special, its just that a lot of people haven't invested the time into good technique. just like any other skill, follow the pro tips, dedicate some time and you'll get better.

I found this old thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911853 but couldn't find your contact information.