Poll: Open up or be closed about business data? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Open up or be closed about business data?

19 pointsjacquesm12 comments

Hello HN,

I was planning on following patio11's example of opening up the books on ww.com, what it's like to run a membership site from the inside, how much it costs to run a site like that, to serve as a living example of what to do (and not to do!) but I'm having a hard time weighing the pros and the cons.

Competition in the field where I'm active is absolutely murderous, there must be a few hundred sites active in this segment.

What would you do, and more importantly, why?

(see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717556)

View on HN

I would MUCH rather see you work on the site itself and bring it into the 21st century. Grab a sick designer, seek a marketer for branding help, and go silent for 2-3 months.

If you don't wanna do that. I would like to see you white-label your service to others with an eye for eye-candy, and you stick to the engineering side of things, delivering kickass, high-quality multimedia in realtime.

Seriously. White-label that fucker and give people APIs and widgets. You will get everyone from porn to security industry to Zoos to e-learning to conferencing.

Cheers! :-)

So, what are you hoping to get from opening the books up? Four years ago when I started, it was a no-lose proposition: heads it causes people to think I'm interesting, tails oh well I just mention that I sold substantially nothing. Your business is already pretty interesting to a solid customer base... is opening up going to materially improve your prospects in any way?

I don't think it will make a difference to me personally, but it might get people here to make better decisions about what sort of model to pursue for their business, and to further the understanding of the membership model.

It's like 'github' for businesses, I hope not to lose anything but help others to gain.

I may in fact gain in terms of feedback and ideas.

I voted "divulge information in a redacted form (for instance, percentages rather than absolutes)".

Being public about your success matters to customers. Business numbers are social proof as well as demonstrating you are reliable because you won't be going out of business soon.

If your competitors are an active threat who are likely to raise money, don't divulge real numbers because you make it easy for them to prove the business model to others without having to invest their own capital and time learning that information themselves.

Finally, being too transparent actually can confuse and annoy customers. Most customers don't understand economics, so if they see you are making 90% operational margin they'll think you're charging too much because they can't account for marketing and capital investments like R&D.

I would go wild and open everything. IFF (if and only if) you believe that it won't hurt your business. I think that transparency can prove to be a great business strategy. That is, if the audience that cares about your transparency could also potentially be your customers.

Whatever you choose... do it fully. Don't open a bit and then dither and change your mind and close it up. Be transparent or do not, there is no try.

Suggestion: Someone should develop a site where people who want to share their insights can register their type of business, evaluate/interview prospects who want the information, and then open their data to acceptable non-competitors. Charge the people who want access and share the revenue with the companies/people who provide the information.

Check out Balsamiq's Blog. The creator wrote many articles detailing the financial progress of the company when they were having explosive growth.

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog

If the field is that competitive, your data is already sort of open. Your competitors probably have an idea about costs and all that.

I'll tell you what I wouldn't do: take an internet poll's results on something this important to you too seriously.

I'm more interested in the reasons that people come up with pro/con, but I wouldn't discount a HN poll off hand, the ones I've seen so far seem to be somewhat serious.

You can always choose to reveal more later. Once it's out there though, it's nigh impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Even if you take it off your sites, other people will still remember it, still quote it....etc... So, if you want to try this, I would suggest: Get your toes wet and see how it feels. If it makes you cringe, stop. If you feel okay about it, give it a little time to see if you notice unpleasant side-effects that you had not expected before moving forward. Don't assume that the initial response is all there is to it. It's not.

(Former public navel gazer. Mostly personal stuff, though.)

Good luck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com