vaksel

because Paypal has a history of shutting down accounts for no apparent reasons. Then it takes months to get your money out.

isn't there? From what I understand Quora has been pretty stagnant. It failed to go mainstream. Sure the valley people know of it's existence...but most people? not so much

Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base

Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic

yeah you'd think with the VC investment they'd be going for that

yeah, YC should have a page on their site with a list of all the funded startups sorted by batches. Maybe a small PR blurb by each startup to describe it.

there are actually a ton of costs for them.

They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI

because when you go up and up the ladder, eventually you end up with 5-6 huge companies that control everything...not too surprising when the companies end up with similar pricing.

I mean take credit cards for example. You have Visa and Mastercard with the majority of the market. Then you have American Express and Discover that have a tiny portion.

That's it. And that's more or less worldwide.

You'd think since the coming of the internet, we'd have at least some competition in this space. Just imagine how much money there is, in join Mastercard/Visa as a top 3 credit card.

Square is a little lower down the chain, so the main thing they are giving here is passing through their huge savings down the pipeline. But even then it's not 100%.

Their basic pricing is 2.75%. So essentially you need to sell $10,000 worth of stuff before you start profiting off the $275/mo...and you only have until $20,000 before you go up to the regular 2.75% pricing.

And 2.75% is pretty high...for credit card processing.

It's probably a bit misleading.

The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...

So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.

Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents

Facebook does analytics...they aren't some tiny startup...surely they track the quality of their traffic...so they know that 70-80% of their ad traffic comes from bots.

So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.

yeah if they only cared about protecting consumers, instead of fines, they'd let you pay a few bucks to get your house inspected.

if you actually read all the rules of the municipality...every single person in town is guilty of something. It's just a way to enforce rules without looking authoritative.

We aren't telling you that you can't do X...but Article 294-984b, section 49a states that doing X is a $50,000 fine.

yeah, something shady must be going on.

My guess is that you'll find similar people on Digg's and News.me boards. And this was just a way to a) write off Digg as a permanent loss off the books and b) transfer those assets cheaply to the other company, which might boost them from being a loser to being a winner

Noone sells Digg for $500K...not unless they are millions and millions in debt

not having to drive to the store is huge

on Amazon you just search, compare, read reviews and click buy.

with brick and mortar stores, you have to drive to the store, park, then roam the store to find what you are looking for, then hope that they have it in stock before you buy, then drive back home. Even a small purchase ends up costing you an hour of your time.

and for large purchases almost always you have to wait 20-30 for the store associate to bring out what you want to buy...and you have to deal with a sales pitch for an extended warranty

someone needs a reality check.

if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries

facebook is really desperate to find a business model...seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at the wall and seeing what sticks.

that's fine for a startup...but for a company that has IPOed it's just plain sad.

if people care so much about craigslist features, then just build something and offer them the code for free.

but that's not what this is about...it's about people complaining that criagslist isn't allowing them to make money from craigslist brand.

to do sales, you need to really know the product...I don't imagine an off the shelf sales guy will be all that effective.

And I'd imagine cost is also an issue. With your own sales team you can just hire people to work on commission...and here you not only have to hire a sales team...but also include a healthy profit margin for Elastic.

yeah it would make much more sense for them to just use the % cut. Get a bunch of developers tied to their platform...and get that market share

you don't get karma for self posts on reddit

Padmapper should offer to be acquihired by Craigslist

their service is 100% dependent on Craigslist so they'd have trouble selling to anyone else

the thing with marketplaces, is that the ui itself doesn't matter...what matters is having buyers.

sellers will post where the buyers are, and it doesn't matter if UI is crap. So craigslist wins on that by a huge margin. Add the fact that it's free, means that they have a pretty entrenched position.

To me, eBay and Craigslist have an insurmountable first mover advantage. They are already established in our culture as the place for auctions/classifieds, you can't undermine that with some flashy UI or a few extra features. And since you need people to sell/buy, you don't have the same viral effect that allowed Facebook to take out Myspace.

The only way I see going at them, is thru incredible service. Rent a huge warehouse. Hire a few drivers.

Charge a fee for someone to come to my house to collect all my spare stuff, take good professional photos. Then list them for sale. Charge a % for all items that sell. Let buyers pick up the stuff at the warehouse instead of having to deal with shady sellers. Offer to ship to buyers. Offer credit card processing etc. Send a check to the seller.

Sure it's a bit more effort than slapping together a website. You'll need to go state by state, renting warehouses and hiring a lot of people to do the legwork and will need to spend the money on marketing. So your profit margins will be closer to a real business than a website(franchising might work for something like this). But if you want to crack the Craigslist nut...you need to put in the extra effort...otherwise you are just one of the hundreds of people who think they are the ones to beat Craigslits

is this partners where you just give them the title.

or is this like what you have with law firms, where they have to buy their way in as well?

you don't need to add forum, in Google click more on the left side, and then select "discussions"...and it'll limit the results to just forums/message boards etc

craigslist could probably eliminate a ton of spam by simply editting out the urls that go thru it's email system.

i.e. if someone includes <a href> inside the email body, simply unscramble it and show the full link.

And on the bottom of the email spell out a warning about affiliates.

This will eliminate most of the spam that goes out to people who list stuff on craigslist.

To fight spammers that list fake listings to gather email addresses...simply implement a private message system for craigslist. Then you can analyze all emails that get sent to users and do the same trick as #1.

You can also limit exposure by blocking messages based on user IPs. Chances are someone from China listing in New York craigslist is a fake.

I think you'll have traction problems on the developer side.

Doesn't matter what kind of job it is, you can be pretty much 100% guaranteed that the job will be listed on the company website without any of the extra hoops to jump through.

Requiring someone to build a web app just to apply is a huge requirement. It's fine if you gave someone an interview, and this is the final step before you hire...but requiring someone to code just to submit an application is abuse.

they should be hit with punitive damages as well

I disagree completely.

Unlike other jobs, you need to always update your skills, learning new languages.

And there is no safety, since your position can always be outsourced by an MBA who wants to save the company a few bucks.

And thanks to blackberry/remote computing, you are pretty much always connected to your job...and can be called in to work at night, on the weekends...and any time your boss pleases.

And there is a huge age bias...so the longer you work, the worse off you are going to be.

And unlike other jobs, with programming, your salary tends to peak early. 5 years experience? $100,000. 15 years experience? $115,000

So sure...programming pays well...but not really as much as you are worth. There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)

I mean sure...programmers make a decent salary...but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we struck some sort of lottery by deciding to go into programming.

it's up to you to define your product line.

nothing is stopping you from just limiting the products.

Normal Accounts? Max 5-20 users.

Enterprise? Unlimited Users

no real difference between the products except for a single value

Easy...both.

Keep the $10/mo plans for consumers. And offer the $1,000/mo enterprise plans for enterprise.

That way your cheap customers will drive a lot of your high end sales.

are you talking about competing on the job market or in YC application?

If the former, you'll need to show a bunch of examples of your work. So do a lot of projects that you can show(+the source code).

If you are talking about YC...once again skill beats paper. I know Octopart both founders were physicists...which learned to code on their own