Users You Don’t Want
themacro.com
themacro.com
If the customer is throwing around a couple million dollars of NRE, it's probably worth bolting something on and pocketing the money. If the customer is only moving a couple hundred thousand, it's probably not.
This seems more like a software-only startup issue. We have hardware and have these hard-nosed discussions all the time--generally about volume.
Customer--"We want X and we want 100,000 units and we're going to put the NRE on this payment schedule."
Us--"No, you're going to put all that NRE up front and it's <2-5 million dollars depending upon change complexity>. And you're going to front the first 10,000 units which is <generally a nice chunk of a million>. After that, we can put you on the royalty schedule. We can't put ourselves in the position of losing the company because your volume never materialized."
Customer--"<choke> <splutter> That's preposterous."
Us--"No. It's the reality of hardware. We know our costs really well."
Side comment: it's always 100,000 units and 100,000 units is generally hardware death--big enough that you have all the volume problems but small enough that your profit sucks.
It's really easy for enterprise companies to get in the trap of making every customer a spacial snowflake, because they need to to get a half mil contract signed. And then the product becomes sorta shapeless, because each customer gets their own product... And you end up a consultancy instead of the platform/SaaS that you originally envisioned.
Sometimes things have a "setup charge" that you have to pay once, but then don't have to pay again.
Manufacturing companies charge setup fees for programming assembly machines, ordering silk screens, tooling, etc.
I thought you just includ NRE in the price you offer to the customer so it can be amortized by volume. But yeah it makes sense if volume will not be realized and you do not want to make bets on your comapny with someones else customers.
Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to drag Product Y along with your product forever as a big lump of technical debt. After a few repeat iterations of the above, you will have a franken-product with random features hanging off of all ends, confusing to general users and impossible to maintain.
If you're a Product X company and one customer wants Product Y, stand your ground and tell them to go find Product Y somewhere else. If tons of customers want Product Y, maybe pivot and become a Product Y company and ditch Product X.
If you sell 1 and a customer asks for 100 it's easy to say no. If they ask for 50 or 25 it's still easy.
The problem is when they ask for 2. Or 1.5, and are willing to pay big bucks to get it. It's hard to know whether your line should be at 2 or 20 or 80, especially when you can make business arguments for all of them and they all come with buckets of money attached.
Do this, and your product people (if you have any) will all quit, and your engineering talent will start thinking "If we're just another custom engineering consulting company now, why don't I just go over to one of the big consulting firms and make actual money doing the same thing?
But more than that, I'm pretty sure the point of the question was to get a list of such firms (I'd like one too!), not to be assured "they're out there, even if you'll never know who they are or how to find them".
* decide that you want to be an engineering consulting firm that charges only ramen, which will make your customer very happy
* become ramen-profitable on product Y without it taking all your time, build and market product X, then dump your customer and product Y (make sure you don't sign a contract saying that you have to keep supporting product Y)
* say no and find another way to become ramen-profitable
I have worked with non-technical founders who just don't understand that concept of a mythical man-month and technical debt. Unless you've lived through it, it just sounds like engineers whining, not a valid business liability. All the non-technical founders I've worked with fall into the trap of catering to their board at all costs.
They were also into consulting, so whatever product they thought up for one customer, they started advertising on their website as a finished product. The product we were focusing on exporting to another country had 1 customer...the one that commissioned the product. We actually didn't learn that until halfway into the project, but by that point, we were already leaning towards suggesting that they forget about exporting any product overseas and focus on getting more business in our area.
I advocated reducing the license fees but charging for customisations which would reduce this bespoke development considerably, but to no avail.
FWIW, every product I've worked on has gone through this.
Far better to agree with someone wanting feature N is that if you want it and it's a good fit for the majority of users, you pay for it - everyone gets it.
It is a hard problem to tackle, especially given the sums involved in delivering sometimes trivial-effort features.
There are always obvious cases in this mind of thing, but the larger point is that we could easily have been looking at an alternative history where Uber was on the scrap heap, and we would all stand here, wagging our beards, berating them for "moving from niche use-case to niche use-case" instead of doubling down and building something of long-term use and value, of executing on their vision. Instead, we're saying that Uber was an instance of a GOOD pivot, but at Uber, at the time it was happening, anyone could've made the argument, "Hey, aren't we just filling a really niche use-case here, of regular people who are willing to trust their lives to unlicensed strangers for a ride?"
I keep thinking this will be the year that the valley types wake up and realize this kind of mentality puts them in existential danger from mobs with pitchforks, but it keeps not happening.
Its a great case because it makes instinctively want to cater for it. Who wouldn't want to help out the developmentally challenged person?
Which makes it all the harder to use our heads rather than our hearts, and make a good business decision.
I suspect the author chose it deliberately for this very reason.
We can sit here and academically discuss the degree of justification of that fact, but that seems to me somewhat tangential to the actual issue.
The thing is, you can say "We can't afford to offer babysitters that are qualified to take care of people with mental disabilities." Say it apologetically on your website or in a questionnaire for new users or something. Don't go bragging about how shrewd you are because you only target the easy, cheap customers.
On the other hand imposing gluten free/peanuts free/convservative free healthy over priced diets seem fine to them.
New tech industry seems pretty living with a double standard about what is acceptable: imposing their price on real estate/food. Being not okay to respect accessibility. There are against the tyranny of minorities unless it is them.
It seems a tad Victorian (Eugenist, hygienist and Malthusianist) to me.
(schlink, schlink, (the noise of sharpening the pitchfork))
All these valley types need to do is tell the grievance mongers to take a hike, and there would not be anything they could do about it.
It's caving into screechers' demands that does these companies in when the outrage happens.
If you open a restaurant, you bet that there are certain building codes you'll have to follow in order to accommodate e.g. people with disabilities.
Right now, as the article points out, it's not something that most tech companies have to worry about unless they choose to, but perhaps it should be.
As startups disrupt entire industries with little regard for the existing legislation, entire niche of users could find themselves marginalized. For instance, hotels have to build a number of accommodations for people with mobility problems. Airbnbs don't. What happens to that segment of the population when/if Airbnb completely kills off hotels in a particular geographic location?
The web is already hell when it comes to accessibility concerns; and it seems like tech companies with a foot in the real world are just carrying this trend over. This is what people mean when they talk about the need for inclusiveness when designing tech products and companies; otherwise, you're just building a world where parents of developmentally challenged teenagers are even more excluded than they already were.
I agree with the core point of the article, but the example chosen to illustrate it couldn't be worse. Yes, it isn't your responsibility to solve everything for everyone, but that doesn't mean you can just choose to ignore the social contract altogether.
Sometimes that's because the driver has an allergy, but often it's just because.
EDIT: here's one lawsuit from Arlington: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/bli...
Here's another from London: http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-wa...
Note that London one has won repeated court cases for the exact same thing. Uber drivers keep refusing to take her and her dog; she takes them to court; she wins; she tries to get an Uber and the driver refuses to take the dog.
Here's a case that Uber settled for a couple of hundred thousand dollars: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-abo...
It doesn't. I've a friend (who might be popping on this thread here soon) who's been working with adapt.org on pressuring Uber on this issue.
In theory, ridesharing should be much better for PWD than trying to hail a cab and cheaper than government services like the MBTA's The Ride. However it very much does not look like it is the case right now.
If the discussion is around "is a wheelchair user able to hail a car and get moved A->B?" Why shouldn't it count?
I suppose they it means that they aren't uprooting the medallion system in that corner of the economy, but that political goal shouldn't block providing access to wheelchair users. Plus, if we want WAVs to be able to operate medallionless, that can be more easily achieved through lobbying by activists who are upset about the higher costs. Uber can just funnel money to them.
> assuming the dispatched taxi shows up
I know there an issue with reliability of wheelchair repair appointments, but I'll admit myself ignorant of the current state of WAV hailing.
Not sure if that's out of the kindness of their hearts, or because they've been made to do it by the govt.
Someone makes Airbnb for folk with mobility problems and makes a killing.
Many accommodations, if not federally mandated, simply wouldn't happen. For example, handicapped parking spots. People who use those spots are technically capable of using other parking locations as well, and the current handicapped parking spots are usually located in prime areas.
Maybe the government can offer a tax return bonus to cover it. And pump more money into fully general cures for all disabilities. I'm not against making disabled peoples' lives better, but focusing entirely on the supplier side is a mistake.
I find this a disingenuous interpretation of how certain disabilities work and how "curable" they may be. Certain degenerative conditions are hardly understood, or the treatment requires time and reasonable accommodations from society such as the need for ramps and wheelchair accessibility. I do not know a way for non-supply-side costs to factor in "being able to use a wheelchair and still function in society".
The cure for a lack of legs is typically prosthetics with extensive therapy. Incredibly expensive and labor intensive.
The cure for amputated legs while being poor is a wheelchair; not as easily managed without additional space when parked, and if there are no ramps up to your building, your business is effectively inaccessible.
But ramps cost extra money. So do wheelchair accessible curbs. You need more space in the isles, specialized bathroom stalls, special door handles, support for someone closer to the floor at your counters... Lots of things we take for granted today, but which didn't exist for many years before the ADA.
I'm kind of big on cyborg technology and other futurist ideas (like brain emulations). Varying degrees are expensive and not even available right now, but a large part of that is a serious lack of funding which in turn cuts business opportunities. (I would bet if society focused more efforts and money on general human augmentation instead of just helping the disabled, the disabled would come along for the ride since the non-disabled market is so much greater. As I touched on in another comment, the second-order effects often provide more value for these niche markets than targeting the niche markets directly.) While we transition to better tech that even the poor can afford we can still consider forced money bleeding, but I'd like to consider demand side solutions too.
The way we do currently is a social contract (enforced in law) that mandates exactly the point that you should serve everyone and are required to make accommodations for e.g disabled people.
Often the reason the regulations are there in the first place is because otherwise the need wouldn't be met.
That is the reality around you now
We don't expect anyone who meets a homeless person to offer them a place on their couch. That would be unfair. And an additional incentive to avoid homeless people. We have (well, not everywhere but at least we aim for) a systemic solution. There are homeless shelters for example, sometimes run as charities, sometimes tax-supported (ie. everyone is required to chip in).
It's weird when we try to offload these problems on the first person who touches them.
Why do I have to bake a cake for a gay wedding if I do such for straight weddings? Because the people who want that requirement have won the level of support needed to have legal support.
Because they're massive rent extractors.
Rent extractors should subsidize most things.
... which means that the capital associated with "people living somewhere" is poorly allocated, and would be more profitable utilized as a nice hotel space. Capital utilization isn't just about the raw duty cycle of someone using that capital. You don't markedly improve your organization's capital utilization by running SETI@Home on idle computers, because SETI@Home is a worthless waste of cycles of little or no benefit to you or society at large.
> Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage
Uber's more of the damage-cartels case, admittedly.
Well, the best utilization is the one with the highest utility. In an efficient market that's the same as the most profitable, by definition. The usual caveats apply: no two individuals can ever agree how to measure utility, a free market won't be efficient unless there are no barriers to entry (city zoning may be a barrier to entry), transaction costs are low (the cost of moving from one apartment to another in the rental market is high), and property rights exist and are enforced (including both the obvious property rights and the ones that would apply to all the externalities like neighborhood character but don't exist and won't be enforced for a variety of good reasons)
So yes, caveats. Obviously. There's a moral character to some of these things. One can argue that people living in houses in a big city is morally superior to people vacationing in those houses. (Is that a thing you'd like to argue? Please do explain why, if it is.)
But to the point before: is AirBnB a rent extractor? Pointing out that caveat apply to the measuring of capital utilization in the abstract is not a strong argument in and of itself. Do they apply here? If they apply, would you care to quantify the impact in dollar figures for a typical city? (I recognize this can be hard for moral injuries, but it's not always clear when the injury ceases to be financial and becomes moral.) And even if these caveats apply, how do they apply to making the case that AirBnB actually extracts economic rents? The main thing it seems to be doing is lowering transaction costs associated with doing a short-term rental, and they do have competitors (HomeAway, Wimdu, Tansler, FlipKey, just plain Craigslist, etc, not to mention that the homeowners face competition from substitutes in the form of hotels) so it's not quite obvious that they're the ones collecting on this economic rent.
If you have more customers trying to make reservations than tables to seat them, it is economically rational to seat the customers most likely to buy your more expensive items. We decided (correctly, IMO) that it is more important for society to fight entrenched racism than to enable business owners to make that particular locally-rational economic decision.
Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less.
I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't know how much of a numerically accurate basis in reality it has.
But, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that there exists an identifiable group [black people, star trek fans, old people, dentists, ...] that are likely to lead a server to go home with less money at the end of the night.
There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism".
Where it gets even more complicated is that there might be variables which are not expressed as "is the customer black" which ultimately predict/are highly correlated with the question "is the customer black" - but are also predictive of the question "is the customer profitable".
There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.
And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal.
It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.
It's probably worth pointing out that the restaurateurs didn't have the ability to make those decisions; that was the point of the Jim Crow legal regime. Left to themselves, they kept wanting to serve blacks.
This isn't a hypothetical example—Airbnb has this exact problem.
I have a hard time seeing where you think this is a tricky question. Let's imagine a terrible person, so terrible that there are no moral issues with just making them do whatever we want.
We've got a racist white babysitter who hates black children. Fortunately, we know better than they do, so we're going to... shut black children up alone with them for long periods? What parents do you think want to hire babysitters who personally hate their children? Why would it be a good idea to facilitate that?
If they all leave the platform, it shuts down. Nobody gets a babysitter. If they all pretend not to be racist, you get black kids being looked after by closet racists.
It's not obvious to me that this is better than the situation where babysitters are allowed to be racist, and black people have more trouble finding a babysitter than white people. There are certainly arguments that it's better, but I don't think it's a slam-dunk either way.
Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.
We can shut down the babysitting service, or we can make the service pretend to acccomodate DD teenagers while failing to actually take care of them. I'm not convinced that "force babysitting services to actually successfully accomodate DD teenagers" is even an option.
If a platform can only sustain itself on the business of strong racists, maybe it should reconsider if it's doing good in the world.
>Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.
Being racist is discrimination, while not wanting to handle DD teenagers is because it's a totally different sort of job. I mean, a 10 year old with dyslexia is still getting a babysitter here. Because that's not a very different babysitting experience.
The two situations don't make a good analogy because of that.
If a company decided to start a sharing economy-based babysitting service, but doesn't have the requisite resources (or training/certification among workers) to look after special needs children, it's okay for them to not cater to those individuals.
It's not as though they have the ability and are denying service - they are choosing not to develop a product or service with accessibility features. I can entertain a normative argument that it's ethically wrong to allow companies to operate in this way, but this is not legally considered discrimination.
I do think that a certain critical mass requires this to be reconsidered, because private companies without as much regulation could displace people who enjoyed accessibility features under older, more established and regulated companies. That said, there are many products and services on the market today which simply cannot be used by handicapped individuals, and for many companies making these products it would be strictly impossible for them to profitably offer a more accessible version.
EDIT: Initially I said taxi cabs are not required to be wheelchair accessible and made an Uber/Lyft comparison. After looking into it, it seems I'm wrong - NYC taxi cabs, at least, offer wheelchair accessibility, you just need to call for it through dispatch as not every vehicle is properly equipped.
Actually, yes they are. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/faq/faq_access_veh.shtml
The State of California recently required all of the ride-sharing companies to produce reports on how they "planned" to accommodate disabled riders, but so far as I know, nothing has come out of it.
The same reasoning would apply to "It's not as though we have an elevator and are denying service - we are choosing to only install a staircase."
If it were a real example and you needed a legal way out (what country / jurisdiction?), maybe referring those cases to another service that is specifically set up to serve their needs would be sufficient.
(edit: There's an assumption here that because one company can't help, that none can. Should we make this assumption?)
I couldn't find a data source for average (better, median) population height and distribution for the US that combined both genders. Do you have a candidate handy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height has graphs with percentile breakdowns, purportedly based on US CDC data, with median female height at around 5'3" to 5'4". Wolframalpha spits back 5'5" as the median human height though it says "weighted for USA demographics".
> that still leaves many women at taller than 5'6".
I didn't forget that at all, I just don't see how relevant it is, unless you think airlines moving hundreds of millions of passengers per year should be optimizing seat sizes for the long tail of the human form.
But that doesn't make it any more feasible, possible, or even safe. We're talking about special needs that will be difficult or impossible for a non-targeted service to adequately meet. It would be better for a different service to specialize in this, as our theoretical service is likely woefully ill-equipped to handle the vetting of caregivers for the developmentally disabled (among other problems outside the original problem domain). I'd even be tempted to argue that attempting to address these problems simply for the sake of soothing guilt and/or avoiding lawsuits would be immoral itself.
Whether or not there should be legislation to cover issues like this is another discussion. (Maybe there should be! If AirBnB manages to kill off hotels in a few spots it would make for some very interesting discussion.) But I don't think this theoretical babysitting app is a good candidate to be targeted by such legislation, and I think it's a little silly to damn this example... There's other help and services out there specifically for the developmentally disabled, and nobody expects every babysitter or daycare to be able to handle the developmentally disabled either. Calm down.
Examples that spring to mind:
* Businesses required to have someone on staff at all times who can communicate via sign language.
* Daycare companies required to have staff capable of caring for children with physical, sensory or mental disability.
Meanwhile on Tumblr:
"Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers."
That's not exactly incorrect, is it? The title of the article is "Users You Don't Want" and the author gives a developmentally disabled person as an example.
No reason this should be an issue (provided it is handled tactfully) as many daycare centers aren't able to take on special needs children, either.
This stuck out at me as an avid Twitch user/follower (and sometimes a streamer). I think they need to re-realize this.
The pivot result (extra effort and focus in Twitch) is being re-pivoted with the introduction of more general-content streams, like Creative, Music, and Social Eating:
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating
And then there are the streams that push the limit:
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos
I wonder why they didn't say 'No' to the users that these streams provide for, and revive/rebuild Justin.tv.
Edit: Formatting...?
I, personally, want it to matter because Twitch's mantra and goals are still focused around being 'for gamers.' As a user, I feel like the "purity" of the space has been diluted. I am not alone in this.
From a business perspective, I guess anything goes as long as it gets eyeballs on ads, people buying bits (Twitch fun bucks), and more channel subscribers but simultaneously balancing the friction that new features have with the established userbase.
>but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind.
Youtube Gaming, Afreeca, and many others still exist; hopefully Twitch doesn't rest on what they have in regards to streaming. Twitch is also no longer just a streaming site; it's a software and wiki/database company now with the acquisition of Curse. Curse definitely brings in it's own conversation of "Users You Don't Want."
Edit: Added Curse stuff.
Sorry for the boring feedback, but the post feels like it needs a bit more proofreading. Some of the syntax is a little confusing and I noticed a couple of definite typos:
> So what should to you?
Should be:
> So what should you do?
And:
> Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business.
Should be:
> Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business?
And you're 100% right: this resulted in us becoming glorified consultants.
I'd add that staying focused on the product is hardest for those from a sales background, who are accustomed to following opportunities. In all fairness, having an engineering background, I'm prone to the opposite problem: not recognizing fast enough when it's time to pivot...
I hate to moralize, but this essay helped me realize that there is, in fact, a baseline level of humanity we hold one another to in this community. And it is pretty inhumane to reduce the weakest members of society to mere obstacles to your business success. Choose another example and you will make your point more effectively.
The same goes for saying no to feature requests. Just because it has an Applesque feel to it doesn't automatically make it right.
A lot of founders get tripped up by needing to show hockey stick growth as soon as they can, because they're usually top performers that are used to knocking expectations set on them out of the park. Saying yes to lots of people is an easy way to show the hockey stick in the first year, but it'll turn into linear growth pretty quickly. Congratulations you now own a consulting company, and your product team is groaning under the weight of enormous technical debt.
Your company is probably going to die now, because you're top engineers probably hate your product and vision.
I don't blame people though, because there really isn't a full proof way to avoid this. Sure, anchor customers can help, but how do you know when you really have anchor customers and when you're just saying "yes" to lots of ideas? In the end, IMO, it's totally subjective (building a great product). You just have to have a sense for it and be willing to fail quickly.
In my experience the best founders actually don't take as much signaling, at least explicitly, from their customers as you would expect. They have a maniacal vision, and they are following it. Their customer help give form to the sculpture, but the basic outline is set. If real hockey stick growth follows, so be it.
At Cronitor, we call this technique the JIT Startup[0]. There are dozens of instances where we've delayed writing code for something until it's actually requested, from boilerplate like PDF invoices to product features like being able to tag something in the UI. We always planned to build them, but working on these things (tertiary to your product) before anybody has even asked for it is a low-leverage use of you time.
[0] https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.2w5dvo...
They create a "Whale" chart, aka "Cumulative Customer Profitability".
See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-feat... for a, umm, insider view of it.
and http://www.magesblog.com/2014/01/whale-charts-visualising-cu... if you want to see some sample code :-)
Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer.
Is he literally saying that someone would be tempted to pivot a product based on a single instance? Or is that loose language for some, say 1% of the user base.
I have a few qualms regarding the avenue Justin.tv took as used for an example, in that yes I'm sure 90% of the user-licenses allow for game broadcasting - claimed publicly[1] - but IP is a slippery issue and willful infringement is potentially quite costly. I'm a former gamer so I also have first-hand experience with, ahem, demands that gamers can sometimes put forward which may or may not be grounded in the reality of IP law. In other words, I'm pretty sure they got lucky with right-place-right-time-right-market which takes some sheen off the innovation, execution, etc type narrative.
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/11/after-twitchs-music-copyright...
If you run a website in North Carolina with $15k MRR accessibility is likely a waste of your time unless you're in a niche that is in some way related.
However, it remains the right thing to do, and much easier if implemented from the beginning.
That said, accessibility is something you do when you're a big company. When you're a startup, work on making it useful to the easy customers, and then only once you have something that lots of screen-reader people want to use is it worth investing time in making it usable.
I think we would heavily disagree on the "healthier" status.
Accessibility is a legal requirement in the UK, and while you're right it's unlikely to come back to bite you as a small company, that's also a pretty crappy attitude to take. I don't like the practice of deliberately breaking the law anyway, but deliberately breaking the law requiring equal access to people with disabilities is awful.
There's an opportunity cost for everything. The most fundamental opportunity that you don't want to miss is building something that lots of people want; if you don't accomplish that (and it turns out to be really hard), it doesn't really matter how well you've built the thing that nobody wants.
Why are these the only three options?
The point (of both my comment and the original article) is that there are trade-offs, and you get to choose which trade-off you're going to accept, but anything you do is likely to piss off someone, so choose who you piss off wisely. Do you want your top priority to be accessibility? It can be, and that could be a wise choice if you identify a task that really really sucks for disabled people. But if you're looking at that before you've even got the fundamentals of building a useful product down, you risk building something that does something nobody really wants to do but does it really well.
It also happens that UGC pertaining to video games is a huge category of content on YT and represents a very lucrative audience (25 year old males with disposable income): http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/12/19/15-percent-youtube-vide...
That's one where you throw money at the problem. You hire a custom operator to handle ADA-requests (and similar) and you pay the price difference for someone who does manage this. Legal compliance issues, you often turn into a mega-expensive non-engineering one-offs.
Or you get slapped with a DoJ investigation, and lose the business.
* Offer an API for third-party integrations that could implement it
* Come up with affiliates that serve this particular niche
* Realize that your opinions might change, and collect email addresses (and consent) to contact folks again if you ever do implement it
o the US govt will have a laundry list of features so
specialized that you really end up working just for them
o companies that are big enough they want everything
running on their internal infrastructure
o health care providers with hippa requirements
o nation states (including the US) that want to impose
monitoring or censorship requirements for you to serve
their populations
o customers who want their children to use your service
or software and have you be responsible for censorship,
controlling harassers, etc
o any minority community, say classic music lovers want
you to accommodate additional metadata that doesn't
show up in a service targeting popular music
i don't think its that unusual. you have to say no sometimes.