6 ms·

What’s it like to have Google and Amazon try to kill your startup?

69 points by simas 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zaroth 11y ago
What I hope actually kills all these products is a decentralized p2p open source system which lets humans find and rate other humans for whatever goods or services they may be selling. The payment system is getting there (e.g. Bitcoin). The consensus algorithms are being worked out, the distributed trust systems are coming into place (e.g. Stellar). The scalable p2p discovery and mesh is pretty much already working (e.g. BitTorrent). Why do we need to pay a 10% tax to companies to do this? I mean, as a civilization. To think the algorithms could never exist that would let me find a professional ______ near me which is, a) an actual person, b) someone who actually does this work for a living, and c) has real-life honest reviews from people who have actually paid that person to provide that service... it just doesn't seem like an intractable problem. If you add up all the expert help, trusted reviews, on-demand this, cloud assistant that, we're talking what, at least 100 billion dollars of rent seeking? Whether or not such a system has an optional secure anonymity layer (a la OpenBazaar) is just a matter of how you want to boot-strap the initial user base. Needless to say, "50% of the world's drug trade also happens to be conducted on the same code-base" may or may not be a great answer to the "how did you hack this system" question. I think the "1099 Economy" is actually a great thing, I just think we could do without the gatekeepers.
- declan 11y ago
  <zaroth>: I'm not sure why you were downvoted, so have an upvote. Not saying I entirely agree with you -- calling it a "tax" is incendiary and no more accurate than saying "why do we need to pay a 10% tax to grocery stores or Amazon?" -- but your broader point is an interesting one. I'm pessimistic about this application of p2p discovery in the short term, but in the longer term (>7 years) you may well be right. The short/medium-term problem, and this goes back to 1990s discussions among cypherpunks about anonymous reputation systems, is that those "honest reviews" are attractive targets for gaming.
  - zaroth 11y ago
    I don't need the karma, I'd much rather have the discussion! :-) Rent-seeking is probably a better description than tax, in that while it certainly costs a lot to build and maintain these systems, and they do provide some measure of value, the goal here is to build scale, build monopoly, and then extract profit. The alternative is building the technology in a open / decentralized fashion which doesn't grant any level of centralized control. Open source software provides such incredible economy of scale that I do think such a system could one day reasonably compete with the best a multi-billion-dollar corporation could offer.
- qq66 11y ago
  If you want to see the non-rent-seeking version of a local marketplace, look at Craigslist. Their service is completely free to most participants. Craigslist has a lot of things going for it, but the "rent seekers" are able to create other advantages that Craigslist can't. They can staff people to bring businesses onboard, get everyone's metadata formatted in the right way, take business photos, handle payment disputes, etc., that they wouldn't have the resources to do without charging a fee on the transaction. For some, Craigslist is better, for others, the Thumbtack experience is better.
  - zaroth 11y ago
    Craigslist is an interesting example. It shows how absolutely little you need to provide real value to a lot of people, but it certainly seems like they aren't even trying to make it better. I think if it was open source you would actually see a lot more interesting and useful features continuously being added. I mean, how long did it take for them to add a map to their rental listings? The software will eventually exist to properly format the meta-data automatically for the vast majority of cases. Also things like providing pluggable viewports / templates so it doesn't have to be one-size fits all. There's nothing to prevent add-on services being used in a decentralized market. For example, payment escrow is absolutely essential for many purchases, and payment escrow services themselves would be discovered and ranked through the same code base. But if you don't need it, you shouldn't have to pay for it. Discovery, search, storage, connectivity, etc. is all done using the local compute and storage resources and leveraging network neutrality. This is an absolutely huge problem space, I've been thinking about it for years, and am hoping to start working on it at least part time later this year. For example, my dad had to move a car last month. He didn't know at the time, but the guy he hired was actually a broker who took 30% of the cost as a finder fee. "Car Transport" is just a simple category in a vast field of services, but you can imagine the interface to collect leads is trivial, and the interface to select vendors, agree on a contract, and commit to the service would be mostly common platform code. Obviously the biggest problem is getting people to use it. The advantage of an open source and distributed p2p approach is the burn rate is basically zero. I can afford to work on it pretty much for the rest of my life at this point, and it would be reward enough to see people using it and benefiting it. Well, we'll see how it goes. :-)
- guelo 11y ago
  Agree these guys are parasites. For example, Thumbtack charges landscapers $15 per lead. It could easily take 5-10 leads to get a paying job. And these are not high earning professions.
- codecamper 11y ago
  10% would be OK. It covers their card processing, advertisement fees, paying some software developers reasonable rates to improve the service. But 10% is not real. These sites charge 15-30% on top of card processing fees. That's too much.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
I wouldn't worry about either for a couple of reasons. Google has the worst customer service ever. When they come into your market, all you have to is hammer their customer service, in advertising if necessary. If you have great customer service, nobody will take a chance with them because their track record of customer service is so horrendous and well documented. With Amazon, as stated in the article, it's not their niche. As soon as they started in your market, start running promotions for discounts for Amazon Prime customers. Pretty sure once they can't sustain their growth, they'll bail out of your markets. Both companies have fatal flaws and are just being opportunistic. If this guy hangs in there, it won't take much to deal with them properly.
- longlivegnu 11y ago
  I personally don't see that Google has bad customer service. I own a Nexus 5 (twice RMA'd) and a Nexus 6 and I've never had a problem with them. In fact I only use the GChat version of interaction too!
- genericuser 11y ago
  I also have had great experience with google customer service there was nearly no wait time and they replaced my phone for free after I broke it through a method entirely my own doing and was calling about mailing it in for a repair.
- bontoJR 11y ago
  Google used to have a very bad reputation about customer service, but in the last 2-3 years they focused on fixing some of these problems. I can't really say they are bad anymore, at least they are in the average, for some products they are excellent. That's my experience.
- gcb0 11y ago
  google and apple have the position microsoft had in the 90s They have the platform and the browser. Much worse than either of them blocking your competing app from their store, is them providing a half assed version of your product by default on their OS. just see how many people installed firefox, or a contact manager, or email client. even in this crowd, i'd bet the numbers are very low.
birken 11y ago
Having been one of the people who built Thumbtack (and a shareholder), this would have been much more of a concern 2 or 3 years ago. At this point Thumbtack (and other companies like Homejoy) are big enough to be able to compete against huge companies. It isn't like the big guys can just jump into the market and undercut everybody on price. Most people who hire service professionals are looking for a high quality experience at a good value. Actually finding those high quality professionals and facilitating the experience with a customer is really really hard. You can't just underprice everybody, you can't just find the cheapest service providers. And having previously worked at Google, local services is like 10x higher touch than any other business Google has. Maybe they bite the bullet and try to do it, but this isn't a very Google-like business.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  What about Google's documented history of pushing competitors lower in search rankings?
  - Relys 11y ago
    Shouldn't that fall under some sort of antitrust law? Edit: Yikes, just saw the thread on EU antitrust accusations which got me thinking about the concept of a decentralized search engine. I found this: http://yacy.net/en/index.html http://yacy.net/en/index.html
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Exactly, and that’s why the EU trial is going on right now. Shopping and Places are two of the main problems the EU sees right now.
  - birken 11y ago
    They already do. Search for "Los Angeles House Cleaning" (or many similar types of searches). There is a 'Google places' block of results pushing down people like Thumbtack and Homejoy. Having used both services, I can guarantee you Thumbtack or Homejoy is a much better result than the 'Google places' results linking to random house cleaners. For example, on my SERP this sparse, unhelpful page (https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en) ranks above both Thumbtack and Homejoy. Once you are big enough you don't need to worry about Google anymore. When I want to buy a product, I don't search on Google and then go to Amazon; I go to Amazon directly. Whoever "wins" the local services space is likely to be similar. People will just go to that site and skip Google completely.
wehadfun 11y ago
Angie's List and Craig's List not Google and Amazon
metaphorm 11y ago
crappy website that throws up a "like me on facebook" popup that I have to dismiss before I get to read the article. guess what, I didn't even read the article. I certainly won't be pre-emptively liking anything on Facebook. seriously, can you at least let me read the damn thing before begging for social media help?
- jkbr 11y ago
  Same here. tp;dr - too pushy; didn't read
- steamy 11y ago
  Are you on your phone? Coz it's working here on my desktop and I have Ad Block installed on the machine
  - metaphorm 11y ago
    desktop machine (an iMac), using Chrome, with Ad Block Plus installed. it got through to me. I shouldn't need browser extensions to read an article without getting harassed. this kind of user hostile behavior is like a throw back to the bad old days of javascript popup hell.
    - steamy 11y ago
      FF Dev edition on Win 7 and just one click in the body region and the modal box is gone!
  - ChrisClark 11y ago
    The Facebook Like popup got through uBlock on Chrome.
spiritplumber 11y ago
I don't know about Google, I do know about one project manager there, who felt that it wasn't good that I finished his pet project about six months ahead of him. Then I told him that my stuff is all OSS and he was welcome to crib from it. At a robotics society meeting in Palo Alto in 2010, he told me that I was just a hobbyist and my project didn't exist. My 'bot had just run circles round his when his stopped working, in front of people. So I put one of my production logic boards in his hands. It had through-hole parts and was spiky. Then I squeezed his hand around it. Hard. "So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?" (My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian friends told me that I handled that masterfully. I tell this story to highlight differences in culture.)
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > "So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?" > (My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian friends told me that I handled that masterfully.) That's a great story, and thank you for sharing it. Though at the risk of getting downvoted, I think I know why your [American] friends were telling you that you didn't handle it well. Aside from the lawsuit potential (which is real), it doesn't really advance the situation in a way that helps anybody - either you or him. Clearly he feels intimidated by you, and that's why he's mentally unwilling to acknowledge you and/or your project. But after you assaulting him[0], he's not going to suddenly change his mind and acknowledge that you beat him. Rather, he's going to double-down, and now have even more reason to believe that you're unstable/immature/unprofessional, or whatever he needs in order to convince himself that you're not worth paying attention to. As for you, it makes you feel better, but it also doesn't really get you what you ultimately want (him admitting that he was wrong). You win the battle, but the "war" goes on, with both sides even more emotionally entrenched in their existing positions. [0] yes, this would qualify as assault
  - magicalist 11y ago
    Yeah, that guy sounds like an asshole, but the GP sounds like an unstable violent person. Bringing it up now to apparently brag about the situation doesn't help but reinforce that... You just beat the crap out of his robot. I don't see how trying to stab him with solder spikes is handling anything "masterfully".
JacobEdelman 11y ago
I upvoted this and now I feel ashamed. This article has a provocative title but in the end all it does is try to make a dramatic situation where there is none. I will be reading fusion.net articles with increased suspicion in the future.

69 points by simas 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

What I hope actually kills all these products is a decentralized p2p open source system which lets humans find and rate other humans for whatever goods or services they may be selling. The payment system is getting there (e.g. Bitcoin). The consensus algorithms are being worked out, the distributed trust systems are coming into place (e.g. Stellar). The scalable p2p discovery and mesh is pretty much already working (e.g. BitTorrent). Why do we need to pay a 10% tax to companies to do this? I mean, as a civilization. To think the algorithms could never exist that would let me find a professional ______ near me which is, a) an actual person, b) someone who actually does this work for a living, and c) has real-life honest reviews from people who have actually paid that person to provide that service... it just doesn't seem like an intractable problem. If you add up all the expert help, trusted reviews, on-demand this, cloud assistant that, we're talking what, at least 100 billion dollars of rent seeking? Whether or not such a system has an optional secure anonymity layer (a la OpenBazaar) is just a matter of how you want to boot-strap the initial user base. Needless to say, "50% of the world's drug trade also happens to be conducted on the same code-base" may or may not be a great answer to the "how did you hack this system" question. I think the "1099 Economy" is actually a great thing, I just think we could do without the gatekeepers.

declan 11y ago
<zaroth>: I'm not sure why you were downvoted, so have an upvote. Not saying I entirely agree with you -- calling it a "tax" is incendiary and no more accurate than saying "why do we need to pay a 10% tax to grocery stores or Amazon?" -- but your broader point is an interesting one. I'm pessimistic about this application of p2p discovery in the short term, but in the longer term (>7 years) you may well be right. The short/medium-term problem, and this goes back to 1990s discussions among cypherpunks about anonymous reputation systems, is that those "honest reviews" are attractive targets for gaming.
- zaroth 11y ago
  I don't need the karma, I'd much rather have the discussion! :-) Rent-seeking is probably a better description than tax, in that while it certainly costs a lot to build and maintain these systems, and they do provide some measure of value, the goal here is to build scale, build monopoly, and then extract profit. The alternative is building the technology in a open / decentralized fashion which doesn't grant any level of centralized control. Open source software provides such incredible economy of scale that I do think such a system could one day reasonably compete with the best a multi-billion-dollar corporation could offer.
qq66 11y ago
If you want to see the non-rent-seeking version of a local marketplace, look at Craigslist. Their service is completely free to most participants. Craigslist has a lot of things going for it, but the "rent seekers" are able to create other advantages that Craigslist can't. They can staff people to bring businesses onboard, get everyone's metadata formatted in the right way, take business photos, handle payment disputes, etc., that they wouldn't have the resources to do without charging a fee on the transaction. For some, Craigslist is better, for others, the Thumbtack experience is better.
- zaroth 11y ago
  Craigslist is an interesting example. It shows how absolutely little you need to provide real value to a lot of people, but it certainly seems like they aren't even trying to make it better. I think if it was open source you would actually see a lot more interesting and useful features continuously being added. I mean, how long did it take for them to add a map to their rental listings? The software will eventually exist to properly format the meta-data automatically for the vast majority of cases. Also things like providing pluggable viewports / templates so it doesn't have to be one-size fits all. There's nothing to prevent add-on services being used in a decentralized market. For example, payment escrow is absolutely essential for many purchases, and payment escrow services themselves would be discovered and ranked through the same code base. But if you don't need it, you shouldn't have to pay for it. Discovery, search, storage, connectivity, etc. is all done using the local compute and storage resources and leveraging network neutrality. This is an absolutely huge problem space, I've been thinking about it for years, and am hoping to start working on it at least part time later this year. For example, my dad had to move a car last month. He didn't know at the time, but the guy he hired was actually a broker who took 30% of the cost as a finder fee. "Car Transport" is just a simple category in a vast field of services, but you can imagine the interface to collect leads is trivial, and the interface to select vendors, agree on a contract, and commit to the service would be mostly common platform code. Obviously the biggest problem is getting people to use it. The advantage of an open source and distributed p2p approach is the burn rate is basically zero. I can afford to work on it pretty much for the rest of my life at this point, and it would be reward enough to see people using it and benefiting it. Well, we'll see how it goes. :-)
guelo 11y ago
Agree these guys are parasites. For example, Thumbtack charges landscapers $15 per lead. It could easily take 5-10 leads to get a paying job. And these are not high earning professions.
codecamper 11y ago
10% would be OK. It covers their card processing, advertisement fees, paying some software developers reasonable rates to improve the service. But 10% is not real. These sites charge 15-30% on top of card processing fees. That's too much.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

I wouldn't worry about either for a couple of reasons. Google has the worst customer service ever. When they come into your market, all you have to is hammer their customer service, in advertising if necessary. If you have great customer service, nobody will take a chance with them because their track record of customer service is so horrendous and well documented. With Amazon, as stated in the article, it's not their niche. As soon as they started in your market, start running promotions for discounts for Amazon Prime customers. Pretty sure once they can't sustain their growth, they'll bail out of your markets. Both companies have fatal flaws and are just being opportunistic. If this guy hangs in there, it won't take much to deal with them properly.

longlivegnu 11y ago
I personally don't see that Google has bad customer service. I own a Nexus 5 (twice RMA'd) and a Nexus 6 and I've never had a problem with them. In fact I only use the GChat version of interaction too!
genericuser 11y ago
I also have had great experience with google customer service there was nearly no wait time and they replaced my phone for free after I broke it through a method entirely my own doing and was calling about mailing it in for a repair.
bontoJR 11y ago
Google used to have a very bad reputation about customer service, but in the last 2-3 years they focused on fixing some of these problems. I can't really say they are bad anymore, at least they are in the average, for some products they are excellent. That's my experience.
gcb0 11y ago
google and apple have the position microsoft had in the 90s They have the platform and the browser. Much worse than either of them blocking your competing app from their store, is them providing a half assed version of your product by default on their OS. just see how many people installed firefox, or a contact manager, or email client. even in this crowd, i'd bet the numbers are very low.

birken 11y ago

Having been one of the people who built Thumbtack (and a shareholder), this would have been much more of a concern 2 or 3 years ago. At this point Thumbtack (and other companies like Homejoy) are big enough to be able to compete against huge companies. It isn't like the big guys can just jump into the market and undercut everybody on price. Most people who hire service professionals are looking for a high quality experience at a good value. Actually finding those high quality professionals and facilitating the experience with a customer is really really hard. You can't just underprice everybody, you can't just find the cheapest service providers. And having previously worked at Google, local services is like 10x higher touch than any other business Google has. Maybe they bite the bullet and try to do it, but this isn't a very Google-like business.

sparkzilla 11y ago
What about Google's documented history of pushing competitors lower in search rankings?
- Relys 11y ago
  Shouldn't that fall under some sort of antitrust law? Edit: Yikes, just saw the thread on EU antitrust accusations which got me thinking about the concept of a decentralized search engine. I found this: http://yacy.net/en/index.html http://yacy.net/en/index.html
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Exactly, and that’s why the EU trial is going on right now. Shopping and Places are two of the main problems the EU sees right now.
- birken 11y ago
  They already do. Search for "Los Angeles House Cleaning" (or many similar types of searches). There is a 'Google places' block of results pushing down people like Thumbtack and Homejoy. Having used both services, I can guarantee you Thumbtack or Homejoy is a much better result than the 'Google places' results linking to random house cleaners. For example, on my SERP this sparse, unhelpful page (https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en) ranks above both Thumbtack and Homejoy. Once you are big enough you don't need to worry about Google anymore. When I want to buy a product, I don't search on Google and then go to Amazon; I go to Amazon directly. Whoever "wins" the local services space is likely to be similar. People will just go to that site and skip Google completely.

wehadfun 11y ago

Angie's List and Craig's List not Google and Amazon

metaphorm 11y ago

crappy website that throws up a "like me on facebook" popup that I have to dismiss before I get to read the article. guess what, I didn't even read the article. I certainly won't be pre-emptively liking anything on Facebook. seriously, can you at least let me read the damn thing before begging for social media help?

jkbr 11y ago
Same here. tp;dr - too pushy; didn't read
steamy 11y ago
Are you on your phone? Coz it's working here on my desktop and I have Ad Block installed on the machine
- metaphorm 11y ago
  desktop machine (an iMac), using Chrome, with Ad Block Plus installed. it got through to me. I shouldn't need browser extensions to read an article without getting harassed. this kind of user hostile behavior is like a throw back to the bad old days of javascript popup hell.
  - steamy 11y ago
    FF Dev edition on Win 7 and just one click in the body region and the modal box is gone!
- ChrisClark 11y ago
  The Facebook Like popup got through uBlock on Chrome.

spiritplumber 11y ago

I don't know about Google, I do know about one project manager there, who felt that it wasn't good that I finished his pet project about six months ahead of him. Then I told him that my stuff is all OSS and he was welcome to crib from it. At a robotics society meeting in Palo Alto in 2010, he told me that I was just a hobbyist and my project didn't exist. My 'bot had just run circles round his when his stopped working, in front of people. So I put one of my production logic boards in his hands. It had through-hole parts and was spiky. Then I squeezed his hand around it. Hard. "So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?" (My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian friends told me that I handled that masterfully. I tell this story to highlight differences in culture.)

chimeracoder 11y ago
> "So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?" > (My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian friends told me that I handled that masterfully.) That's a great story, and thank you for sharing it. Though at the risk of getting downvoted, I think I know why your [American] friends were telling you that you didn't handle it well. Aside from the lawsuit potential (which is real), it doesn't really advance the situation in a way that helps anybody - either you or him. Clearly he feels intimidated by you, and that's why he's mentally unwilling to acknowledge you and/or your project. But after you assaulting him[0], he's not going to suddenly change his mind and acknowledge that you beat him. Rather, he's going to double-down, and now have even more reason to believe that you're unstable/immature/unprofessional, or whatever he needs in order to convince himself that you're not worth paying attention to. As for you, it makes you feel better, but it also doesn't really get you what you ultimately want (him admitting that he was wrong). You win the battle, but the "war" goes on, with both sides even more emotionally entrenched in their existing positions. [0] yes, this would qualify as assault
- magicalist 11y ago
  Yeah, that guy sounds like an asshole, but the GP sounds like an unstable violent person. Bringing it up now to apparently brag about the situation doesn't help but reinforce that... You just beat the crap out of his robot. I don't see how trying to stab him with solder spikes is handling anything "masterfully".

JacobEdelman 11y ago

I upvoted this and now I feel ashamed. This article has a provocative title but in the end all it does is try to make a dramatic situation where there is none. I will be reading fusion.net articles with increased suspicion in the future.