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Ask HN: Are you a single founder ?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you a single founder ?

#61

Post by davidw »

lsc wrote: post #60
davidw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The niche a trattoria competes in is inherently limited by geography, whereas there's no reason a VC funded bingo card creator can't try and muscle in on patio11's turf. The only reason is probably that there is simply not enough money there to support that kind of investment/expected return. So I guess if there's a fair point in it, it's to go after some niche that has an upper bound to its profitability as a defens…

but what could money improve there? advertising, and ? Corporations are usually not run by subject matter experts; my experience consulting for corporations has been that the decision is usually a compromise that ends up being... suboptimal. I mean, they usually get the job done, eventually, but they spend a lot more money on it than they need to, and they usually don't solve the problem in the most elegant way. I gu…

> the marginal cost being nearly zero means that the chance of hitting a few out of the park justifies a whole bunch of expensive flops.

Yep. If you're interested in the economics of our field, I can't help but recommending 'Information Rules' ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20 ). One of the co-authors is now the chief economist at Google.

Re: Ask HN: Are you a single founder ?

#65

Post by donny »

jvehent wrote: post #64
donny wrote: post #33

1) About a week or two. Finished 2 days ago 2) Never applied 3) No, self-funded 4) https://text-factory.appspot.com/

Interesting. Can it be called from a script to send monitoring text messages (with cacti, for example) ?

yes... HTTP POST... For example, on Mac OS X Terminal.app:

curl https://text-factory.appspot.com/apisend --data-urlencode 'number=+1xxxxxxxx' --data-urlencode 'message=it works with space' --data-urlencode 'key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'

Re: Ask HN: Are you a single founder ?

#66

Post by lsc »

davidw wrote: post #61
lsc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but what could money improve there? advertising, and ? Corporations are usually not run by subject matter experts; my experience consulting for corporations has been that the decision is usually a compromise that ends up being... suboptimal. I mean, they usually get the job done, eventually, but they spend a lot more money on it than they need to, and they usually don't solve the problem in the most elegant way. I gu…

> the marginal cost being nearly zero means that the chance of hitting a few out of the park justifies a whole bunch of expensive flops. Yep. If you're interested in the economics of our field, I can't help but recommending 'Information Rules' ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20 ). One of the co-authors is now the chief economist at Google.

heh. I'm a janitor, not a programmer, so the marginal costs in my field are definitely non-zero. As I sadly say when I buy a particularly large amount of hardware "But, that's my porsche!"

But my point was that I think the advantage that the large corporation has is not as big as people seem to think it is. It's a lot more expensive for them to swing the bat than for you to do so, and you don't have to do as well. I think the only large advantage that large corporations still have in this arena is advertising, and of course in software like modern games that is too big for one person to complete in a reasonable period of time.

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