vaksel
Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic
They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI
I mean take credit cards for example. You have Visa and Mastercard with the majority of the market. Then you have American Express and Discover that have a tiny portion.
That's it. And that's more or less worldwide.
You'd think since the coming of the internet, we'd have at least some competition in this space. Just imagine how much money there is, in join Mastercard/Visa as a top 3 credit card.
Square is a little lower down the chain, so the main thing they are giving here is passing through their huge savings down the pipeline. But even then it's not 100%.
Their basic pricing is 2.75%. So essentially you need to sell $10,000 worth of stuff before you start profiting off the $275/mo...and you only have until $20,000 before you go up to the regular 2.75% pricing.
And 2.75% is pretty high...for credit card processing.
The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...
So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.
Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents
So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.
We aren't telling you that you can't do X...but Article 294-984b, section 49a states that doing X is a $50,000 fine.
My guess is that you'll find similar people on Digg's and News.me boards. And this was just a way to a) write off Digg as a permanent loss off the books and b) transfer those assets cheaply to the other company, which might boost them from being a loser to being a winner
Noone sells Digg for $500K...not unless they are millions and millions in debt
on Amazon you just search, compare, read reviews and click buy.
with brick and mortar stores, you have to drive to the store, park, then roam the store to find what you are looking for, then hope that they have it in stock before you buy, then drive back home. Even a small purchase ends up costing you an hour of your time.
and for large purchases almost always you have to wait 20-30 for the store associate to bring out what you want to buy...and you have to deal with a sales pitch for an extended warranty
if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries
that's fine for a startup...but for a company that has IPOed it's just plain sad.
but that's not what this is about...it's about people complaining that criagslist isn't allowing them to make money from craigslist brand.
And I'd imagine cost is also an issue. With your own sales team you can just hire people to work on commission...and here you not only have to hire a sales team...but also include a healthy profit margin for Elastic.
their service is 100% dependent on Craigslist so they'd have trouble selling to anyone else
sellers will post where the buyers are, and it doesn't matter if UI is crap. So craigslist wins on that by a huge margin. Add the fact that it's free, means that they have a pretty entrenched position.
To me, eBay and Craigslist have an insurmountable first mover advantage. They are already established in our culture as the place for auctions/classifieds, you can't undermine that with some flashy UI or a few extra features. And since you need people to sell/buy, you don't have the same viral effect that allowed Facebook to take out Myspace.
The only way I see going at them, is thru incredible service. Rent a huge warehouse. Hire a few drivers.
Charge a fee for someone to come to my house to collect all my spare stuff, take good professional photos. Then list them for sale. Charge a % for all items that sell. Let buyers pick up the stuff at the warehouse instead of having to deal with shady sellers. Offer to ship to buyers. Offer credit card processing etc. Send a check to the seller.
Sure it's a bit more effort than slapping together a website. You'll need to go state by state, renting warehouses and hiring a lot of people to do the legwork and will need to spend the money on marketing. So your profit margins will be closer to a real business than a website(franchising might work for something like this). But if you want to crack the Craigslist nut...you need to put in the extra effort...otherwise you are just one of the hundreds of people who think they are the ones to beat Craigslits
or is this like what you have with law firms, where they have to buy their way in as well?
i.e. if someone includes <a href> inside the email body, simply unscramble it and show the full link.
And on the bottom of the email spell out a warning about affiliates.
This will eliminate most of the spam that goes out to people who list stuff on craigslist.
To fight spammers that list fake listings to gather email addresses...simply implement a private message system for craigslist. Then you can analyze all emails that get sent to users and do the same trick as #1.
You can also limit exposure by blocking messages based on user IPs. Chances are someone from China listing in New York craigslist is a fake.
Doesn't matter what kind of job it is, you can be pretty much 100% guaranteed that the job will be listed on the company website without any of the extra hoops to jump through.
Requiring someone to build a web app just to apply is a huge requirement. It's fine if you gave someone an interview, and this is the final step before you hire...but requiring someone to code just to submit an application is abuse.
Unlike other jobs, you need to always update your skills, learning new languages.
And there is no safety, since your position can always be outsourced by an MBA who wants to save the company a few bucks.
And thanks to blackberry/remote computing, you are pretty much always connected to your job...and can be called in to work at night, on the weekends...and any time your boss pleases.
And there is a huge age bias...so the longer you work, the worse off you are going to be.
And unlike other jobs, with programming, your salary tends to peak early. 5 years experience? $100,000. 15 years experience? $115,000
So sure...programming pays well...but not really as much as you are worth. There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)
I mean sure...programmers make a decent salary...but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we struck some sort of lottery by deciding to go into programming.
nothing is stopping you from just limiting the products.
Normal Accounts? Max 5-20 users.
Enterprise? Unlimited Users
no real difference between the products except for a single value
Keep the $10/mo plans for consumers. And offer the $1,000/mo enterprise plans for enterprise.
That way your cheap customers will drive a lot of your high end sales.
If the former, you'll need to show a bunch of examples of your work. So do a lot of projects that you can show(+the source code).
If you are talking about YC...once again skill beats paper. I know Octopart both founders were physicists...which learned to code on their own