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The real problem was they had no business model; spending money to get users when you don't even know what your return is? That's ludicrous. That's a core busin
by coryl 14y ago
The real problem was they had no business model; spending money to get users when you don't even know what your return is? That's ludicrous. That's a core business issue from day one.
- tptacek 14y agoThat depends on what kind of business you want to start. I'm a fan of growing slow and not taking outside capital. It worked pretty well for me, and working with VC, not so much. But the fact that bootstrapping works for some products doesn't mean it works for all of them. In particular, a product with serious operating costs and high cost of user acquisition is hard to bootstrap. It's one thing to sell products to, say, every freelance developer in the world. Freelance developers are (relatively speaking) wealthy and interested in products that improve their practices. Parents are not generally in an ambient state of seeking products to secure their kids Internet connections. That makes them hard to reach and sell to.
- damian2000 14y agotwitter, google & facebook might disagree
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoTwitter/Facebook grew virally, not through paid marketing to acquire users.
- erik_landerholm 14y agoWe did have a business model. Jason didn't talk about it much, but if you look at my original post and Brandon's more in depth post it's there. Was it a billion dollar business? Probably not, unless we owned most of the space if not all the space. This was inconceivable when you looked at the players.