A Unicorn Is the Last Thing This Web 2.0 Survivor Wants

What I originally meant by customer was the person who paid for the service/good being developed. I don't personally consider investors to be customers. They are partners in my eyes.

Also, interestingly, I don't necessarily consider users to be customers. For example Facebook users are not customers since they don't pay anything for the service. The customers are the people buying ads. The most interesting thing is that Facebook probably does not provide much value at all. If people would have to pay $15 a month for it, I suspect it would fail quickly. But the gathering of all those faces is worth something to the advertisers. So Facebook (and Google, etc) are caught in a fairly tight squeeze of diminishing returns on adding value to the users. They need to spend enough to bring enough faces to get advertising, but more money/facility is not useful.

In almost every job I've worked in, my users are not my customers. In a few jobs I've had no customers -- just speculating investors. It becomes a race to the bottom where we try to make the lease expensive thing that will attract faces (or in the case of speculating investors, create a disruption).

Can you imagine having a business plan where you go to an investor and say, "I want to make something that is worth $1000 a year to a user"? If I can find 1000 users, that's a million dollars a year -- enough to fund a decent development team. I know. It's ludicrous. Why would we try to make something that someone values as much as their daily cappuccino?

I don't expect my short rant to change anyone's mind. But maybe after people discover that the "fractions of a penny per face with billions of faces" market is not so large as they thought, we'll have more CEOs trying to think about how to make a product that users want to pay for.

So the fact that I'm paying less interest AND the value of the asset has increased isn't helpful?

Again, I'm not making the argument that low rates are "good"; I'm saying they're good for me.

Uh, no. My mortgage is inarguably cheaper due to low rates. So is my car payment.

Is it possible that the price of the asset I'm borrowing against is higher because low rates are inflating asset prices? Possibly. It depends where I live and when I bought my house. If I just re-fi'd at lower rates, it's cheaper, period. Besides that, the inflated price shows up as an asset on my personal balance sheet.

These second-order effects are relevant, but not substantial.

This is true in almost exactly the reverse of the sense you intend; interest rates are low as a fairly direct result of poor results on a number of economic measures; its true that the conditions in which low interest rates occur are bad, but that's not because of low interest rates, it is what low interest rates are a response to.

Inflation in prices is one of the signals which leads to higher interest rates. (While there are some wrinkles, pretty much the main purpose of monetary policy is short-circuiting destructive positive feedback loops in the economy by introducing negative feedback mechanisms to counteract them.)

We have low inflation and moderate unemployment. Pushing up rates will cause deflation and unemployment. If we want rates to go up we have to push up consumer price and wage inflation.

You can repeat that as often as you want, but it simply isn't true. It's post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning: we see low rates in times of trouble, therefore low rates caused the trouble?

>My liability is your asset

Exactly. So whatever return you aren't earning on your capital, I'm saving on my use of that capital.

I think the public have got far too accepting of little or no support. Yes it's easy to switch, but most people don't unless it's a commodity service - you have to risk the unknown, maybe migrate years of data with little certainty that support in the new home will be better. Sales support tends to be great (and unscripted from more aware staff).

There's a magic size, let us imagine it at 100 people where nearly all human endeavours become crap. Try getting support out of your electric utility, car maker, government, phone service, national charity, hard drive maker etc. Personally I think it's connected with the size where they will still hurt at, or at least talk about, your loss.

It's certainly possible to get far beyond this size and still give great support - look at Amazon and Apple. Amazon got far beyond that size before starting to become a bit rubbish. Essentially until they started ruining the brand trying to move into food, tablets, 3rd party merchants and everything. Apple have the advantage of their restricted OSX hardware, iOS app store and so on that they have a fairly known quantity to provide support for. I think the key to be in this category is what you think your brand stands for.

I think in many, particularly social spaces, it's easy to forget we're not the customer. eg, you can actually get responsive support out of Google adwords or if you buy a Nexus from them (not always great support, but they answer promptly enough). So we're never getting support for search, G+, Facebook or Twitter. I'm sure there;s scope to do it much better, even for the free services.

Lastly, I think specifically in the startup space when you're aiming for 20% growth a month, or even a quarter is going to make it far more difficult to do well. Especially if your offering is evolving as fast - even your staff will struggle to stay aware. So it becomes about great user stories, and outreach (PR) and devcons. Good for growth, but chances are individual customers get lost in the gaps. I think the tendency to shoot for an IPO or buyout is unhealthy here - individual experience matters less if you don't need to care about ongoing trading profit whilst getting big fast. That said there's plenty of services I don't think would have happened, or be great without being big. Small Spotify doesn't get music licences, small Uber doesn't have availability when you need it, etc.

EDIT: Didn't realise I'd written that much!

It's a balance. It's hard.