State of Independent SaaS [pdf]

Please don't rush from the first detail that infuriates you to the HN thread to post about it. That's the opposite of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Curiosity looks around to see what's new; fury rushes to react to something old. It also breaks the site guidelines because (a) it will probably start a flamewar, and (b) such discussions are basically always the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Instead, wait until the first infuriated rush subsides, and then reflect on what a thoughtful post might say, and how it might contribute to curious conversation. If you can't think of anything like that, it's the better part of valor not to post. This is the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here.

My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1].

In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’.

The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime.

To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]:

"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."

The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write:

"Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”

Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States. And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit.

Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.”

[1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002)

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

Along these lines, can anyone recommend a framework for developing a SaaS prototype? Ideally, it would include things like payment processing, user auth, admin dashboards, etc. I've been looking at Laravel Spark, but I'm wondering if people have other suggestions.

13% of America is literate enough to code??

> 5. When you're boostrapped (which is where this report is skewed toward), you don't have the time or resources to provide support to non-paying customers.

I'm highly skeptical about this one. Very, very few freemium services actually struggle due to the cost of supporting free users. Unless you're doing something unusually resource intensive or nobody is paying, the infrastructure costs of having free users is usually a rounding error.

I'd estimate that around 99% of people who use the tutorials on my site do so for free, but the only cost I even really notice is for my email provider. Even at 100x the current usage, I'd still be on the same $10/month server.