davidspinks

Every company starts as a community. As they grow up, they just forget. They must return to Neverland.

Wealth is something rarely talked about amongst community builders. It's taboo. But there's an opportunity to have a more nuanced conversation about the intersection of business and belonging. Are capital and community at their best when they drive each other?

Adding some sort of kickstarter functionality to this would be really interesting. Or making it possible to earn ownership points by investing money, though I imagine that might alter the purity of the community dynamic. Excited to see how it all comes together either way.

Really solid list of tools for any startup that's building a new community from the ground up. Love to see more companies "building in public".

It was definitely broad and sure doesn't cover the entire spectrum of companies. I do believe that it include a whole lot of startups today though, and I hope that this helps them think about how to better set themselves up to succeed.

How am I shutting down debates? I think it's important to respond to anyone who has a unique perspective.

"Some business models are "get as many users as possible, get acquired, and live as a loss leader for a larger organization" and that's perfectly fine."

I agree, and address that in the article.

Yea that's a good point...though one could argue that they're still selling a product, the insurance. But yea this model may require a different approach.

So you disagree with what the post is saying?

I'm trying to respond to the content of your post. If it's such common sense then it should be easy to come up with examples. I'd argue that there isn't much in between. Either you're building a company that has to sell a product or you're building a high growth monetize later company. This post is addressing the former option.

"maybe some products should not be free and the creators should consider paying for them"?

Not sure what you mean by the creators should consider paying for them.

Any examples?

How is this marketing? It's about validating an idea to make sure you're building the right thing.

"Like, getting situated, getting everything working, working out the kinks, evaluating possible monetization models, etc. etc."

What does getting situated mean? Working out what kinks? People aren't paying for your product they're paying for what they believe your product to be. Kinks don't matter.

"Uhh, no. A lot of companies can work on this model. And do so. The examples are numerous."

Lets hear them.

"And, what is it with this condescending style of writing? If the content of the article wasn't full of reductive, hand-wavy half-baked ideas, the arrogance in that entire piece would be forgivable. But that's not the situation it looks like."

Sounds a lot like your feedback.

Issues should be solved now so use the original url.

Sorry about that, should be better now, replaced the broken caching plugin with w3edge.

I had one installed but it wasn't working for some reason. I replaced it with W3Edge now and it's working great. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Site should be performing better now. W3edge helped with caching. Thanks for reading.

Sorry about the server issues.

Cached version: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en-US&set...

That's a fair point and probably a much better use of the mantra. Unfortunately, that's often not how it's applied, in my experience.

My bad.

My host is working on the issue. Wasn't planning for a HN hit.

Truth. I chose FatCow. Usually it's enough to get my job done but not today, it seems.

Working on the server issues. Unfortunately FatCow is slow to fix. I wasn't expecting to be on HN today (=

Yea my bad. I'm but a wee blogger using FatCow hosting for my often minimal traffic.

Try refreshing.

Sigh.

Thanks for sharing (=

The Samwer brothers definitely deserve respect in a world where execution is paramount. Often, they execute more efficiently than the companies they copy.

If anyone says it's easy to just copy a company, they've never built a company before. There are so many intricacies that go into building a company and culture the right way. When you look at a company, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. You can copy the part that you see, but without everything under it, you won't succeed.

One thing I would have loved for Rich to speak about a bit more is their treatment of the founders and employees of Rocket companies. I've spoken to employees before who shared stories of very harsh work environments and high turnover rates. Founders get very little equity. Employees get none.

From a business perspective, obviously they're doing something right and if people find enough value in being a part of these companies to put up with the downsides, that's their decision.

Still would love to see a deeper look into the negatives.

It wasn't the most lean approach to launching a startup. If they did some testing up front, they should have been able to identify the user retention issues early on. It's weird that a team with so much experience didn't properly test the product before investing so much time and money into it.

I doubt that this is the last iteration we see from the Airtime team, but the initial product was definitely telling.

In the end, looking in to a company from the outside, no one really knows wtf they're talking about when they pass judgements.

Glad we were able to help!

Members of the Zaarly team from pretty much every department sits on the livechat at different times. Everyone from marketing to design to development spends time on there to learn from actually talking to users first hand.

Your bug report will be delivered untarnished, I assure you (=

David Spinks Enforcer of User Happiness

Been a long time fan of Mixergy. Andrew has a talent for digging into the responses from founders to try to get real, honest answers out of them.

This shit is rockin.