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"identify an actual human inside the mothership"

This is so valuable. I was intrigued by who wrote this and no wonder it is Patrick. (I highly recommend this article by him: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...).

My two cents: Talk to human. Develop social skills they matter more than what you think.

Thank you, Patrick, for the cool splash of water.

My heart goes out to PriceZombie, a tool I really liked using. It makes me wonder, are contracts just passé in today's web/app economy? Do founders not care about having the rug pulled out from underneath their business at any time?

I of course understand if this is a side project, not a full time job, and can't be given 100% focus. But I feel like I woke up from a bad dream: everywhere I look, it's the same App Store model: Apple, GooglePlay, Amazon, Steam...

For a while I worked for a company that had a direct line to engineers at all of their suppliers (which they often earned by only calling with the right questions). This caused them to get issues fixed quickly and competently, sometimes with them supplying parts of the fix.

I've since returned to working for companies that rely on first line support, and it's much harder to get the support you need, so I totally agree with this point.

A relevant xkcd as always https://xkcd.com/806/

> "LISTEN UP. 80% of you are building on these platforms. If you do not have a direct line to God at their HQs you ARE NOT TREATING THIS LIKE A BUSINESS. You will %(#)%#0 fail. If you are working with one of these companies, and you are not on that bus, you are dead to me."

This is why 90% of Silicon Valley Healthcare startups are ephemeral. They can't sell to Hospitals and they won't pay attention to the "dinosaurs" that try to tell them otherwise. There are some industries that you can't "disrupt" unless you're going to play by it's rules.

This is exactly correct. Sometimes I would like to think starting a technology business is all about the tech but in reality business is personal.

Building relationships is critical and so is maintaining them. They provide real value and if you are building on someone else's platform you better trust they won't pull the rug out from under you (or at least have a backup plan). It's totally okay to rely on a company's platform as long as you understand the risks and mitigate them. Getting a bug in someone's ear at the company is one way to reduce the risk that something will go awry.

The same principle applies within larger companies. It's a lot easier to get things done once you have a guy you know in ops, a gal in DB, a buddy at the IT helpdesk...

Most large organizations end up functioning at all because there are networks of competent, motivated individual that use that kind of favor trading and rule breaking to make the system work despite the bureaucracy. A key part of joining a new large org is to look for one of those networks and prove that you have the skill and attitudes required to get hooked up into that network.

It's amazing how companies can flourish or wither depending on whether the people on those networks end up growing in status and exercising more influence, or marginalized and quitting.

And on the flip side of that you have dysfuncional large orgs where incompetent people get to move up and form networks with others just as incompetent.

I'd strongly urge that in Amazon's case this advice is functionally irrelevant as they aren't a reliable business partner that reacts in a consistent way when it comes to MWS operations regardless of who you know that works there unless its Bezos himself.

I agree. The advice by patio is generally sound, though in this specific scenario, I don't think Amazon would ever care. PriceZombie offers negligible profit compared to the billions Amazon makes. Even spending 0.5 seconds on their case is a waste of their time.

I would have thought that Amazon wouldn't want transparent price comparison websites. Wouldn't that tend to cut into their products?

I don't agree with that at all. We have to guess how much transaction volume PriceZombie sends to Amazon, but $50k/month isn't an unreasonable estimate (probably very low). It is totally worth a couple hours of a support person's time to deal with the source of $600k of annual revenue.

- (business lost to other sites with lowest price)

it's entirely possible Amazon did this math

Where did you get $50K from? I would guess that's a huge factor above what they exactly make. I'd estimate somewhere a few thousand (and maybe even less than $1000 some months) to $10K at most. If they're making $50K/month, they must be very very good marketers, or they're doing something very shady.

I said "transaction volume", which is the value of what people paid Amazon via PZ's affiliate links, not what PZ made in affiliate fees.

I wouldn't be so quick to disagree.

I spent 2 years generating over $1mil a year in sales through the Amazon affiliate program - to be dropped without warning or contact. No amount of follow up and attempts to contact my, previously very accessible, account rep resulted in anything. Not even an explanation on why my account was closed, outside of being told that I could take legal action (in the state of Washington) against Amazon to collect on the nearly $40k in yet-to-be-paid earnings.

I disagreed that it 'would be a waste of their time'; not saying they'd act rationally. In my limited experience it seems like they don't.

Exactly. I also deal with Amazon on a seller's platform and can confirm this. It doesn't matter who you know, the company itself is bipolar and unreliable.

As a fellow third party seller on Amazon - I am astonished by how dysfunctional and unreliable Amazon is. I cant imagine relying on FBA for my main source of income because Amazon is so fickle. For example - I have had an item in reserve [1] in their warehouse since Jan 18th!! I opened a case about it on March 4th (for those following along, that's three full weeks ago...). They just keep saying "we've contacted the warehouse and will get back to you if they can find it or not." Apparently I'm supposed to accept that items I send them are unable to be purchased for over 2 months?

It wouldn't be a big deal if this was an isolated incident but it's not.

But people continue to sell on Amazon because that is where the customers are.

[1] Reserve means an item is unable to be bought, either because it's in reserve for a customer order that hasn't shipped or its being transferred to another warehouse.

I'm confused. Was the mention of a tour just something that reminded him to give that advice, and it was completely unrelated to the rant? Was he assuming that anyone that wanted to go on the tour was in that situation, an assumption that makes very little sense?

In a room where he expected ~40 participants for the tour he had ~6 hands raised, which caused the core dump.

Were that many of them partnering with those particular two? And if they had really good access already they wouldn't need a new tour.

Well I'll just assume it made sense in context.

Thanks. That wasn't clear to me. Good advice as well that I think I should be applying better.

This is really not surprising.

Here on HN a few months ago I remember person X saying "I have a successful business in that domain and I can help you. My email is in my profile." and the OP in that thread responding "OK, maybe I'll email you when I can" and being taken to task (correctly, IMHO) by another poster for not immediately jumping on what was really a great opportunity offered to him by a complete stranger.

For those of us who are trying to start businesses, it's very helpful to be occasionally dopeslapped on the side of the head by someone saying "stop being an engineer, this is business. TALK TO PEOPLE!"

What you just described is why a number of large businesses have relationships with politicians.

Facebook destroyed Zynga overnight. All of a sudden they decided billions in revenue wasn't worth the spamminess. Now, their feed is at least as spammy but with out the spam coming from friends and being part of a game. shrug

I think it's better that spam doesnt come from friends/feel part of the game. That would feel even more intrusive to a lot of users.

I wonder how many people are emailing Mr. Bezos in response to his email address appearing here.

> You should, as early as practical, identify an actual human inside the mothership and convince them to like you.

This presumes humans will retain abilities to manage such decisions, or can manage them at scale in the future. If a company relies on an API for revenue, the best strategy is to have a backup for that API and then a backup for the backup API. A hope-and-a-prayer email address may or may not help retain an existing business relationship, which frankly all depends on the circumstances. Sometimes even a president can't get a company to do something if it is against policy or contrary to revenue.

Assuming connections to people are sufficient to head off changes in business models is a fallacious argument steeped in the idea that VC was a good idea for your company. The VC lead model is the cause of these type of problems, not people who are expected to simultaneously work 20 hour days and still have a life - which is where real connections are formed and retained.

I would have told Dave to go fuck himself.

There is always a human that can make decisions and override policies. If you don't find one of these, get his or her contact, and take them out to dinner as often as possible you're a fool.

source: I worked for a company that had / was part of my job to talk to a dedicated adwords account manager. Even google has such a thing. They can ok stuff for you that virtually nobody else gets and, in the event it's later judged noncompliant with policy, forwarding that email chain makes things ok. It also ended up being part of my job to take him out drinking in sf.

Also, your api & backup api is dumb. There is no alternative to facebook. There is no serious alternative to adwords. There is no alternative to google search. For many things, there is virtually no other retailer on the internet that matters besides amazon. That's reality.

When you and a Google account manager go out to dinner, who picks up the tab?

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