I don't know if it is the same for everyone, but here in France, YouTube advertisement have been just that since the coronavirus began.
Almost all advertisement is young people posing with expensive car (probably rented) trying to sell you their seminar/conference. It has become so shameless that they even try to sell course on "how to dropship properly". Its scamming all the way down.
I find the one trying to sell dropshipping course very funny because it is really scammer trying to scam other scammer.
How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
181–190 of 265 posts
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm all ears.
Check the footer of the website you’re on right now? The whole thing is content marketing for an offering of capital.
But how much capital do you need to get in front of YC in the first place?
It's a genuine question. Who's the poorest YC founder? Least family wealth, least angel/seed investment. Who genuinely managed to get YC funding without putting in any money of their own?
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say 95% of digital nomads are just online marketers who market their own lifestyle so that they can sell a course on how to imitate them. And obviously, their customers will imitate them and sell a course on how to imitate them. And so the cycle continues.
I've fantasised about the vanlife, living the nomad lifestyle out of a van. When looking for build inspiration videos on YouTube, I ended up seeing a lot of vanlife "influencers", but what I notice is many videos just have a few thousand views, which is surely not enough to make a living..
Most influencers can't make a living. There's so many of them that it's a buyer's market.
When I was still selling naughty bikinis online, I did a few promotions with Instagram yoga teachers and I was always surprised by how low their asking prices were.
I guess most of them valued having any success to show for it much higher than being paid a livable wage.
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. A bit. Check out my comment history here for more detail but mostly it’s this: Work remote contracts to fund yourself while building a saas business targetting real problems that companies will spend money on. Repeat as necessary until you hit a niche that works. My first success was on try number six or so. The second was half a dozen tries later. Good luck!
It's basically what I'm doing however I have steered clear of B2B as I suspect the 10 hours a week will be hard to stick to once I have paying customers who have support requirements. How do you contain expectations in that regard?
My experience with businesses is that the bigger they are the less support they need.
All in, I spend maybe an hour a week on support, across my 2 paying products. Nearly all of that is for the cheapest accounts. Companies with money have people who know what they're doing, who can quickly figure out what the product does and how to set it up, and who then go use it as intended without needing any hand holding.
I picked 10 hours a week in my example because that's where it was when I was building those things "full time". Now that they are feature complete, it's a lot closer to zero. I haven't opened the IDE for either of my rent paying products since the summer.
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say 95% of digital nomads are just online marketers who market their own lifestyle so that they can sell a course on how to imitate them. And obviously, their customers will imitate them and sell a course on how to imitate them. And so the cycle continues.
> I'd say 95% of digital nomads are just online marketers It’s strange ‘cuz I’ve been working in digital nomad hotspots for years and have met very very few people like that. Lots of translators, programmers, and then a complete mishmash of other people, but very few people selling courses, and the ones who _were_ selling courses generally nothing to do with being a digital nomad
If you can afford to rent a table in a coworking space, then you have already separated yourself from the other 95% of digital nomads.
When I was working remotely from Asia, I sometimes went to cafes in the backpacker areas and there would be lots of people working online and posting selfies about their dream life, but their entire monthly budget was like $300. Even in Asia, that's not enough to rent a good office, let alone for apartment +office +food.
Also, maybe you just didn't dig deep enough. I myself was once feeling quite impressed about someone getting rich from making iOS children's games. But when I had issues with my own apps and asked him for advice, it turned out that he was actually making a living from selling an Udemy course on how to get rich by selling apps... And as usual, the revenue from Udemy was presented as if it had come from the apps.
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#186Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars. Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that. Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...
Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too! Can't turn around without bumping into an electric car / reusable rocket company these days.
Well, for electric car, that's true...
>Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too!
Did those other companies in the space (of space) got NASA contracts and subsidies?
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you get past a few million dollars, the extra money is just bargaining power and losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life
Lol you clearly are mistaken about how human emotions and happiness works
However it works, it's still true to "losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life".
Butthurt emotions is not the same as lower quality of life (e.g. less access to food, entertainment, travel, housing, health, studies, taking care of kids/relatives, etc).
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
From that link: > In 2010, its stock price was $20 and by 2017 had risen to $380 a share, yet Tesla reported a loss of $4.3 billion. How is this possible? The only way to explain this bizarre scenario is to recognize that the market is not efficient I will pass on buying/reading that book based on this excerpt alone. I am far away from a tesla fan (I actively encourage my friends/family to not buy teslas, or invest i…
How would you explain it then? I don't believe Tesla would be valued so highly or fluctuate so violently if the market was actually efficient.
The market is efficient in the sense that it aggregates all knowledge between market participants. Nevertheless, no one actually has a crystal ball to predict events far in the future. Tesla's valuation and volatility can both be explained by some market participants expecting huge growth over a long period of time, with a correspondingly huge uncertainty over the actual outcome.
Just to put some simple numbers on things, a commonly held expectation is that Tesla will grow revenue at ~50% a year until 2030 while maintaining high margins. At that point Tesla's revenue would be approximately 1T with perhaps 100B in net income. A fair valuation would then be around 3T, assuming there is still some future growth left.
This largely explains today's 500B valuation - if there is a 30% chance of this scenario playing out (and Tesla goes bankrupt in the other 70%) then this is a reasonable bet compared to buying other stocks.
As for the volatility, imagine if the average market participant changes their mind and believes that Tesla is only likely to achieve a 40% growth rate over the next decade. This would drop 2030 revenue and profits by more than 40% compared to the previous scenario, and today's stock price would fall significantly as well.
Re: How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
#190The "nomad" posts always bugged me, especially when it's someone traveling around the world by working odd jobs and relying on the kindness of strangers. They're always presented in a way to make you feel bad about having a steady 9-5 working for "the man" when you could be seeing the world and being free. They conveniently leave out the fact that their lifestyle is completely dependent on the majority of people work…
I think being a digital nomad implies working a remote job that's not tied to your location? If you work odd jobs you're just a regular nomad.
This is correct.