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TFW when white collar professionals complain about the prices businesses charge in order to pay the white collar salaries necessary to make the products they us

TFW when white collar professionals complain about the prices businesses charge in order to pay the white collar salaries necessary to make the products they use. And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's like carnivores being judgmental of hunters.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
careful talking about profitability in your point, as most of these companies are reinvesting to chase unicorn/monopoly level growth. some struggle with profit not because it's a tough biz creators should be thankful to them for, but because they're structured/managed for growth over current customer needs. for-profit platforms will always seek to maximize the function, the marginal value of the rent they take. any charity to creators is incidental dynamics along the way
markstos 4y ago
Ghost provides similar features for bloggers but does not mark up subscription payments from subscribers. The cut of payments is about 3%.
- unity1001 4y ago
  Except they don't collect, process and pay international tax like EU VAT. Or California sales tax etc. You have to correctly collect it and file it one by one. So Ghost is not a creator platform. Its a payment platform.
  - markstos 4y ago
    Ghost is a platform for creating content. Ghost partners with Stripe to handle the payments. For a customer who runs a small town Indiana newspaper, who may be a somewhat typical customer, it's not that complicated: They won't have international subscribers and they would pay state and federal taxes-- standard income staff stuff. And doing so with Ghost vs Patreon could save thousands of dollars per year!
    - unity1001 4y ago
      Not really - because, with Patreon you can very probably report your income as 'Patreon income', whereas with Stripe, you will need file each and every single income that enters your account because Stripe does not do that for you.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Patreon is a CRUD app and something you could build in a few months and consider it done if you wanted to. The core value proposition of Patreon hasn't changed since they launched, and the business problem is still "take $$$ from people, figure out how much to pay each creator, pay out $$$ to creators". > And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's not profitable because it's an engineering playground - the objective is not to solve the business problem described above, it's to build complexity for the sake of complexity to justify future funding rounds. If they wanted to, they could literally consider the project done and run it with a skeleton crew handling support & maintenance, but why intentionally put yourself out of a job?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cu3PO42 4y ago
  I don't disagree that the core concept of Patreon is relatively simple and may even be able to be recreated in a few months, but what you definitely can't do in that amount of time is to comply with the breadth of regulations all over the world.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Patreon is a CRUD app and something you could build in a few months and consider it done if you wanted to. Yeah. EVERYBODY says that for EVERY single app or service that is posted on Hackernews. They could do it with even less people and funding. Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people. Apparently, real world works differently.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people. What about https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com ? Also, keep in mind that once a well-funded player with infinite money to spend on marketing enters a market it's often no longer worthwhile for a bootstrapped player to compete even if it's possible on technical grounds.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

careful talking about profitability in your point, as most of these companies are reinvesting to chase unicorn/monopoly level growth. some struggle with profit not because it's a tough biz creators should be thankful to them for, but because they're structured/managed for growth over current customer needs. for-profit platforms will always seek to maximize the function, the marginal value of the rent they take. any charity to creators is incidental dynamics along the way

markstos 4y ago

Ghost provides similar features for bloggers but does not mark up subscription payments from subscribers. The cut of payments is about 3%.

unity1001 4y ago
Except they don't collect, process and pay international tax like EU VAT. Or California sales tax etc. You have to correctly collect it and file it one by one. So Ghost is not a creator platform. Its a payment platform.
- markstos 4y ago
  Ghost is a platform for creating content. Ghost partners with Stripe to handle the payments. For a customer who runs a small town Indiana newspaper, who may be a somewhat typical customer, it's not that complicated: They won't have international subscribers and they would pay state and federal taxes-- standard income staff stuff. And doing so with Ghost vs Patreon could save thousands of dollars per year!
  - unity1001 4y ago
    Not really - because, with Patreon you can very probably report your income as 'Patreon income', whereas with Stripe, you will need file each and every single income that enters your account because Stripe does not do that for you.

Nextgrid 4y ago

Patreon is a CRUD app and something you could build in a few months and consider it done if you wanted to. The core value proposition of Patreon hasn't changed since they launched, and the business problem is still "take $$$ from people, figure out how much to pay each creator, pay out $$$ to creators". > And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's not profitable because it's an engineering playground - the objective is not to solve the business problem described above, it's to build complexity for the sake of complexity to justify future funding rounds. If they wanted to, they could literally consider the project done and run it with a skeleton crew handling support & maintenance, but why intentionally put yourself out of a job?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Cu3PO42 4y ago
I don't disagree that the core concept of Patreon is relatively simple and may even be able to be recreated in a few months, but what you definitely can't do in that amount of time is to comply with the breadth of regulations all over the world.
unity1001 4y ago
> Patreon is a CRUD app and something you could build in a few months and consider it done if you wanted to. Yeah. EVERYBODY says that for EVERY single app or service that is posted on Hackernews. They could do it with even less people and funding. Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people. Apparently, real world works differently.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people. What about https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com ? Also, keep in mind that once a well-funded player with infinite money to spend on marketing enters a market it's often no longer worthwhile for a bootstrapped player to compete even if it's possible on technical grounds.