If your only goal as a founder is to eventually sell out and make yourself a billionaire, this is fine. If you want to build something of long lasting quality/consistency, then exploring other business models isn't just noise.

When you're free of outside influence you're enabled to perfect your business offerings, or at least be consistent in what you offer, without worrying about greater and greater shareholder returns.

It's no coincidence that Craigslist looks the same as it did 20 years ago, Arizona Ice Tea is still 99 cents, and Chicfila has the best fast food customer service.

Though more intrusive to wear/use, I would imagine there are some bionic leg braces that could keep legs stable 99% of the time.

Facebook makes its money by leaving the feed an unorganized mess of random posts, leaving the user disoriented so that more eyeball time can be harvested for advertisements while the user searches for the content they want (or gets stuck mindlessly scrolling the infinite reel of videos and other content for that dopamine hit).

It's not lost on the army of six figure salaried engineers that a lot could be done easily to make the experience better. But that isn't in the interest of the shareholders. The quality is a feature, not a bug.

The racing game was mainly one of endurance, the longer a player could last without crashing, the greater their chances of getting higher score. It didn't take long for some players to write scripts to keep their car going for hours, automatically detecting obstacles and switching lanes. Nowhere in the contest rules was this or any kind of scripted play explicitly forbidden.

Despite this, the contest period came and went, and Chipotle has never made an official announcement on any winners for the top 10 prizes, including the Model 3.

Several media outlets reported on the contest when it was launched. Apparently none of them followed up on the winners.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848405

Points: 10

# Comments: 12

Craigslist is a great example of this; I highly recommend looking up Craig Newmark and his ideals. It's been around for nearly 30 years in more or less the exact same form, doing the exact same thing. It's privately owned and Newmark could sell the whole thing and be instantly propelled to billionaire status, but choses not to. There are no outside investors or corporate shareholders pushing for a bigger and bigger return every quarter. And no bloated teams of six-figure salaried engineers inventing work for the sake of work to justify their jobs and their resumes.

That mindset will at least keep the platform going for the rest of the life of the founder. On the 1000 years part, the next question is probably how would one legally structure a private company to restrict outside investments/purchases and straying too far from its original mission.

Points: 7

# Comments: 7

Anyone can choose to build a quality app/service/startup based on the merit of the actual product with company growth fueled by actual need of technical talent and profits from a monetization model, rather than just taking venture capital and hiring six-figure salaried engineers just to fill another open office chair and implement selfie filters.

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

In those cases, I'd love to have a process to make content that shows others how to get started solving the similar problems I faced. What would be the optimal choice (or combination) of formats that would be the most profitable? Youtube tutorial video, along with a written article (personal blog post, then exported to Medium) and link to github sample code? Micro course on a proprietary learning platform like Udemy? I'd love to know what combination others have found that has produced the most results in exposure and profit.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20070326

Points: 19

# Comments: 10

It may not be that you "want to rethink your strategy," but if you stumbled into becoming a one man show for a super niche unrivaled business app, why talk about that on a forum of developers?

I uploaded my resume, and after getting in (every potential candidate has to be accepted) I got free advice over the phone from one of their career coaches on what resume and profile changes to make in order to attract more employers. Soon after that they started reaching out to me for interviews. There is a culture in the service of being respectful of your time as a candidate, so if the recruiter knows they don't offer every single thing you specified wanting in your profile they'll get that out of the way in the first phone call. They almost always discussed salary and remote benefits on the first call so I knew if their offer was in line with my expectations.

I signed up in February and was contacted by 9 employers, interviewed with 7, and accepted an offer with 1 in March.

Full Disclaimer: if you want to check out the service via my referral link, I'd get a commission the first time an employer reaches out to you, and if you accept a job through the service. Also, if you accept an offer through Prime, you get to pick a free gift from Indeed. (I chose a PS4, which I'll start using when The Last of Us 2 comes out).

Ref link: https://prime.indeed.com/refer/c-Wrs9hjR

Non Ref Link: https://www.indeed.com/prime

Points: 1

# Comments: 0