5 ms·

Agreed. This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested. They already g

Agreed. This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested. They already give you future time in the form of bug fixes. To ask for more is blind entitlement and quite silly, yet absolutely rampant. It's kind of like how we say everyone should work in the food industry for a while because it sobers you up to reality. Maybe the same should be said for trying to sell software or run a website that has actual users. Those are two additional ways to see how poorly some people will regard you no matter what you do, just like working in the food industry or retail.

derefr 9y ago
> This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested. I mean, that's precisely what you do when you buy equity in a company. One time payment goes in, permanent entitlement comes out.
- always_good 9y ago
  What does that matter? Was the OP an investor taking on risk? Not quite sure how that's even an exception to what I'm talking about.
  - derefr 9y ago
    People who pay for the products of early-stage startups (or, say, back Kickstarters) have an emotional intuition that they've invested in the company, despite there being no legal truth to that fact. As a growing company, you have to keep that in mind when modifying your business model: you can't betray the (entirely incorrect!) emotional intuitions of your customers, or they'll boycott you.
    - always_good 9y ago
      Actually you can. I've heard it called "firing your least profitable customers." I haven't heard too many postmortems of people that've gone "we should've given in to the entitlement of a portion of our users." But I do hear the opposite.
- thelittlenag 9y ago
  That is true, but the price structures are different. Stock prices, and other equities, are already priced with everyone knowing that you have permanent ownership. Software isn't priced that way. If it were then I would expect prices to be much higher.

derefr 9y ago

> This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested. I mean, that's precisely what you do when you buy equity in a company. One time payment goes in, permanent entitlement comes out.

always_good 9y ago
What does that matter? Was the OP an investor taking on risk? Not quite sure how that's even an exception to what I'm talking about.
- derefr 9y ago
  People who pay for the products of early-stage startups (or, say, back Kickstarters) have an emotional intuition that they've invested in the company, despite there being no legal truth to that fact. As a growing company, you have to keep that in mind when modifying your business model: you can't betray the (entirely incorrect!) emotional intuitions of your customers, or they'll boycott you.
  - always_good 9y ago
    Actually you can. I've heard it called "firing your least profitable customers." I haven't heard too many postmortems of people that've gone "we should've given in to the entitlement of a portion of our users." But I do hear the opposite.
thelittlenag 9y ago
That is true, but the price structures are different. Stock prices, and other equities, are already priced with everyone knowing that you have permanent ownership. Software isn't priced that way. If it were then I would expect prices to be much higher.