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This could be very cool, but I'm interested in your business model. I'm sure you're unbiased now, but ultimately you'll need to make money, which has a tendenc
by fishtoaster 6y ago
This could be very cool, but I'm interested in your business model. I'm sure you're unbiased now, but ultimately you'll need to make money, which has a tendency to bias things. One of the reasons I've trusted The Wirecutter in the past is because they're pretty up-front about how they support themselves. Being vague about that seems like it'd make it hard for Satchel to build that same kind of trust.
- Fission 6y agoThanks! I shared some thoughts on this earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237147), but I also wanted to take some time to discuss the points you made. Completely agree that The Wirecutter's up-front-ness and monetization is well-aligned with the end customer. Wirecutter's affiliate model works well with consumer goods b/c affiliate rates are mostly standardized (mainly by Amazon), which mostly mitigates conflicts of interest. This doesn't work as well in SaaS because vendors are so fragmented. This means that there would need to be a lot of checks and balances to avoid bias in B2B software. That's why any eventual monetization likely won't look like Wirecutter's. Once we settle on a way to make money, we'll make it transparent. I'm just being vague right now because we don't know what exactly that is, so we're being... transparently vague :)