LiveAgent: Over $250K monthly recurring revenue with a spin-off project
failory.com
failory.com
'The student will work'?
So they just straight up admit they're exploiting students as unpaid employees? Students aren't supposed to work, they're supposed to learn. Damnit, America.
Why not both? Don't get me wrong, I think its shady to make money off someone without paying them. I personally just had a really positive experience working while I was in school, and never really stopped learning just because I left school. Curious why you think this is actually a bad thing?
That would be bringing about a world where students don’t have to work or in this matter, be exploited.
It’s not useful to equivocate or find nuance in these things. After all, I doubt the students who wind up working for them will think kindly of the random Internet person who was like, “I think it’s shady” and then equivocates.
That’s like saying, well at least the illegally below wage people have a job. Usually those people begrudge the equivocators. You should be able to see why.
If they produce value for a company, what exactly precludes them from being compensated?
Hey now, they're based in Bratislava.
Pretty big worry if a bunch of readers at HN haven't worked that out yet. I only figured it out because I didn't think that was what LiveAgent did.
They might be getting paid by someone else, but the comment I quoted specifically talked about getting paid by the company.
Unpaid internships are a lot more common than some people appear to believe. I initially believed it as well, because my internships were well-paid, but then I realized our industry was the exception rather than the rule.
[0] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
This sort of stuff happens all the time. Its surprisingly common for unpaid interns to operate in a grey area. Can't really say this company is doing anything illegal without actually knowing what the program looks like for the apprentices. Every company I've worked at has decided its better to just pay them something, even if just minimum wage, to avoid risk of lawsuit. I also just think thats the right thing to do.
I don't think it's a bad idea, as in many times the real knowledge comes from practicing and using all the techniques you have learnt. But agree that working for free sucks.
> The extent to which the intern’s work complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees while providing significant educational benefits to the intern.
The argument would be made that since the company is charging for work from unpaid interns to be fulfilled only by unpaid interns, it would be displacing the work of paid employees as opposed to complementing them. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that going into the litmus test.
- is the student doing something that tangibly contributes to the business? - is the student doing something that you would normally pay an employee to do?
If the answer to either of those questions is yes, you should pay the student/intern. Of course, IANAL, and this only applies to the ISA, but that is how acquaintances who are self-employed handle their interns.
The only time you can have an unpaid intern is when their work is substantially education, and does not contribute to the bottom line.
Many many years ago I used to produce internal business plans for a big ISP - and if you had to quickly justify a proposed purchase, you always needed some competitor analysis so you had to go find competitors to the product you are looking at.
Yellow pages don't really cut it, but a great source was "Analyst reports" where there would be some bubble diagram showing market share and competitors.
What I think i am saying is that in the B2B space, above a certain price tag, the best thing you can do is to identify the biggest dogs in your niche, and do all you can to have PR stories out there saying "$YOURCOMPANY, unlike competitors bigdog and biggerdog ..." or better still (but harder) "biggestdog, like competitors biggerdog and $YOURCOMPANY"
Curious that google casually disrupts even that
- Search for 'better than [x]'
- Type '[x] vs' into Chrome's address bar to see what autocomplete provides
"On the other hand, no software is perfect and if somebody says, their software is bug-free, they are lying."
Strawman to dismiss folks who argue for high-quality software. If they think it doesn't exist, they probably didn't know about Cleanroom Software Engineering and Praxis' Correct-by-Construction:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html
http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf
There's a difference between accidentally being buggy because the problem is that hard and intentionally leaving it buggy for faster iterations. They're doing the latter. Which is fine in their situation. They could probably adopt some proven approaches to increase their QA results on the cheap, though. Easiest route is some slice of design/code reviews plus contracts (esp pre-conditions) with contract/property-based testing and fuzzing. Catches all kinds of problems.
It's still good growth, but I expected it to have all happened in one year based on the title alone.
> We were kids and we were selling virtual server space for games like Counter Strike or World of Warcraft to other kids.
Blizzard has never sanctioned third party or self hosted servers, if you're hosting WoW on a private server you're breaking ToS and risking a hefty lawsuit. I have to wonder if that contributed to the failure of his first company, or if perhaps it was just a poor choice of game title to embellish his story. Either way, it smacks of dishonesty.
Probably lost some current users to that, but in the long-run, it probably increased it by a lot.
Since they where smart enough to only offer two users and more users are set at top-plan pricing.