P.S. It’s kind of like when Porsche entered the SUV market with the Cayenne, which didn’t have a conventional SUV look but still crashed the market.

That really diminishes attractiveness of working in a startup where all your efforts could be swooped out by a big player via just buying IP and acquihiring founders for a price cheaper than buying the whole company and without the hustle of regulatory scrutiny. Big tech literally kills competition and innovation guaranteeing its monopoly.

Back when I did websites for clients, often after carefully thinking a project through and getting to some final idea on how everything should look, feel, and operate, I presented this optimal concept to clients. Some would start recommending changes and adding their own ideas—which I most often already iterated through earlier during ideation and designing.

It rarely builds a good rapport with clients if you start explaining why their ideas on "improvements" are really not that good. Anyway, I would listen to them, nod, and do nothing as to their ideas. I would just stick to mine concept without wasting time for random client's "improvements"—leaving them to the last moment if a client would insist on them at the very end.

Funny thing is that clients usually, after more consideration and time would come on their own to the result I came to and presented to them—they just needed time to understand that their "improvements" aren't relevant.

Nevertheless, if they insisted on implementing their "improvements" (which almost never happened) I'd do it for additional price—most often for them to just see that it wasn't good idea to start with and get back to what I already did before.

So, sometimes, ignoring client's ideas really saves a lot of time.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44315808

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

1. Blogging is a very good way to help sorting out own ideas and shape thoughts on a particular topic. Unless you write it down and try to express your idea coherently, thoughts are just bouncing inside your head without proper actionable output. I notices from my own experience that ideas form and progress much better when I write them down.

2. Blogging is helpful as a form of journalling about particular topic—to return to later. Sometimes I read my old posts to refresh my memory and often get surprised that it was written by me—after some time I forget what was the logic that led me to a particular idea or descision and old posts look like written by somebody else.

3. Blogging helps to discipline oneself. Writing and editing takes time and effort. Only regular stable blogging attracts any audience at all. Not that it's important, but it's good feeling when somebody finds what you wrote helpful. Many just want to get audience without understanding what it really takes. It's not that easy. So, as a byproduct of the first two points, one learns what it takes to produce good content with a regular cadence.

It takes effort to carefully write, edit, and rewrite. But it really helps with our own thought process, improve ability to shape ideas, helps save sorted out ideas for later, and disciplines ourselves.

So, I'd say blogging is a pure self-improvement exercise—fitness for the mind.

Very soon not having an AI integrated into a phone will be a very good positive differentiation for a phone or PC brand.

1. https://gemini.google/advanced/

1. Help to create a deal-flow by writing about a current thing or their specialization in tech;

2. Promote its portfolio and pump it in every possible way for it to increase in value;

3. Promote its agendas and narratives like regulation/untiregulation.

So, yes. A16Z's media channels are a marketing tool.

The truth is everybody on the team risks—tech or non-tech founders: both types invest their own time and expertise regardless of a task to be done. The fact that non-technical founder doesn't code MVP doesn't mean that there is no time/expertise invested that moves the needle. So, both invest and should better "date" for some time to test getting along.

The funny part is that it's people like the author who got easily tricked by a good salesman and smooth talkers into working for free. A good salesperson clearly sees what motivates such people and promises a lot of it to only deliver nothing later.

For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let's say a company creates a service valued as 1X by the customer and the customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers.

Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the same value of 1X (0.43 = 30% of 1.43). It means that the balance is ruined and customers do not get enough value for what they pay. In value, they still get 1X despite paying for 1.43X.

There is a price elasticity curve that measures how many clients a company loses after each step of the price increase. In other words, a company gets significantly fewer customers due to the increased price at the same time, it’s unable to benefit from an additional 0.43X customers paid. A drop in the revenue is significant. At the same time, the company needs to increase its marketing budget effectively decreasing its margin even more. That makes business unsustainable.

Imagine what a decrease in purchases a product gets if its price is increased by 43%. This ruins all economic assumptions of a business.

Not to mention that if it has any network effect, significantly fewer users result in a degraded experience for all users.

I'm considering using PWA for the next mobile app and not investing in native iOS development. Even 50% fewer users due to PWA installation is better than being a lifetime slave to Apple which extorts 43% of what a company gets after Apple TAX from a user.

For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let say a company creates a service valued as 1X by customer and customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers.

Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the same value of 1X (0.43 = 30% of 1.43). It means that the balance is ruined, and customers do not get enough value for what they pay. In value they still get 1X despite paying for 1.43X. Hence, a company gets significantly less customers and at the same time it’s unable to benefit from additional 0.43X customers paid. Drop in the revenue is significant. That makes business unsustainable.

So, what a company could do? It could provide more value by letting go own margin in favor of only Apple benefitting from the service or it could increase marketing expenses to attract more users. But then again that additional marketing budget eats into a company’s margin. And again, makes it uneconomical.

Maybe it used to be acceptable to pay the Apple Tax in 2008 when it was enough to just create a simple non-cloud app like calculator, submit to AppStore, and forget about it. In those days there were no expenses to actually run the service. Now the core of mobile services happen outside Apple ecosystem and an iPhone is a mere access point and interface to them. Nothing more. It’s a mere mobile browser for 3rd party services.

Wonder how many great businesses weren’t realized due to Apple making them uneconomical.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36945979

Points: 188

# Comments: 193

https://link.babich.me/ycdeal

It's good to optimize in the early days but it's also important to not be penny wise and pound-foolish. In general, today there are a lot of standard deals, documents, and lawyers who specialize in start-up deals. Properly speaking, for a law firm it is usually worth making its services inexpensive and accessible for fresh start-ups since it's the firm's investment in keeping these start-ups as clients should they grow and become big. It's not worth it for a lawyer to rip off a start-up for pennies and lose this start-up as a client when it becomes big. Not to mention losing reputation among other startups. So, for a start-up, it's worth finding the right lawyer who works mostly with start-ups and not rely on "general practices" pushed by a VC or VC's own loyal lawyer that surprisingly serves only this VC's pocket.

Taking money at the early stage is a tough game. When founders take an investor's money, the investor's business model becomes the business model of their start-up: only outlier growth and outsized returns. The longer start-ups bootstrap the better it is for founders and for business. Preferably, to bootstrap till the product-market/fit and take money only as a fuel for growth. This way a start-up has a lot of leverage in fundraising since it doesn't need money to survive—just to have more fuel to make the fire bigger.

Calculations in my post make it obvious that any pre-seed round (including Y Combinator's deal) results in founders losing a very big chunk (30%+) of their start-up by the time they close the next Seed round or priced round in YC'S deal case.

Nevertheless, if there are no other options and the only one is to take money early, then so be it. It's better like this than nothing at all.