Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
Money is good, but not having everything dictated by it is good for the mission.
EDIT: Sure there's still a financial incentive there but it's framed more in the "we need to turn a profit so that we can afford to continue doing these things". We still have salespeople who still have commissions and we still have salaries to pay.
VC funding is required if you want to build something massive, but isn't a great idea if the founders just want to build a sustainable but small business.
Companies like MailChimp and Atlassian are great examples of bootstrapped companies that became very successful. There are more.
Money is great to have at any stage of a company, and bootstrapped companies prefer to trade stability and time for the freedom of not having money (and those who only focus on it) control decisions.
You can build a great company with and without investment, but you can fail with either just as well.
With the way things look right now for high-tech (or any software development) companies the margins are quite high. But of course, if you are a VC who invests in hundreds of businesses, and expect only a few of them to fly, then those few must fly pretty high to make it worth your while. Which means that being just very profitable is not enough - you need to be extremely profitable. And that comes with compromises (mostly for the workers at such startups).
With VCs who only care that the growth curve is exponential, they go for short term money every time, because yeah you might crash the company, but you've got a 5% chance of becoming a big evil corp.
If you start a platform around paying customers you make it one way, if you start it around getting as many users as you can and then monetize the popularity, then you are selling your users, and that's another way entirely.
And stock investors often aren't much better.
If people believe in your brand, you have something. If they don't believe in your brand, you have nothing.
Uber is
Quora is nothing but spammers self marketing. There is no moderation whatsoever.
If you don't wanna read it, that's fine. I'm just saying that if you do, there's a way.
Yes, it is slightly annoying, but it is extremely easy to dismiss. Unlike the nag screens at many sites you don't have to find and click an 'x' in some weird location. It goes away if you click anywhere on the page outside the nag screen.
It also goes away if you hit ESC on the keyboard. (I don't know if other keys also dismiss it too. I've only tried ESC).
Furthermore, also unlike many other sites, it comes up right away rather than waiting for you to get into the article and then interrupting you. So it is click on a Medium link, get shown the nag screen immediately if it is going to be shown at all, and then hit ESC or click somewhere and it goes away.
And it's not immediate, there's time enough for your eyes to adjust to the content of interest before that modal pops up. It's as if it's designed for maximum obtrusiveness.
The experience is further degraded by a header and footer that not only take up significant screen real estate but also only seem to exist to also prompt me to sign up.
So that's three obtrusive prompts asking me to sign up - the modal, the header and the footer. This is unique in that the annoyance has a depth of redundancy.
I can't believe that I could get free cPanel/PHP/wordpress hosting when I was a teenager, and people will live with a fullscreen nag ad for their company blog 17 years later.
There's a lot more to say about such practices, but that's the gist of it.
Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account.
"Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..."
"In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 cents."
And they are getting more sophisticated so it's not always so easy to spot.
www.excite.com
The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....
I used to have an excite.com email.
Edit: I'm glad to see they're still up and working hard to service customers at: http://www.penisland.net (totally safe for work, trust me)
A: In most cases we can handle your wood.
I remember I used to have to log in to read content back in 2013ish, but I don't have to do so right now.
OK just give me a second..
The exception to that rule is Stack Exchange, because they have a business model that is unique to the space and impossible to replicate for a site like Quora (Genius, Answers.com, wikiHow, et al.).
Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential, to avoid the dreaded down rounds and eventual drift toward forced sale. There's only so much legitimate high quality content for a site like Quora and it's nowhere near enough to validate a $2 billion valuation (much less higher).
Consider for a moment that Yelp - which is a real business in a highly monetizable segment, that is also profitable and will hit an annual billion dollars in sales soon - is worth $3 billion. So if you get a $2 billion valuation as Quora, where are you going from there? It's obvious.
Genius is facing the same exact fundamental problem that Quora is. Take a lot of money from VCs, get a big valuation, find it impossible to live up to it. Turns out normal people don't want to annotate everything and could mostly care less unless it's a more narrow passion segment (music).
There are only two paths for knowledge services. Stay small and very lean, aggressively limit costs, and use an ad model - that's wikiHow. Or go the Wikipedia route. Anything involving VCs will end in disaster and or forced sales. Knowledge services properly have to think very, very long-term (if they're actually trying to fulfill a knowledge mission and aren't just traffic fronts), they need a decade outlook or more. VCs think short-term, they look at ~5-10 year type exit outcomes. High quality, long-lived knowledge services are fundamentally opposed to a focus on exits in any manner, as they have a higher calling than looking for an exit for a VC - and any deviation from that must inherently destroy the community.
There's definitely value to be created, but the catch is focusing. Someone will pay for the best data on their problem. Very few people are interested in buying 100 dumpsters full of random text: I can't see general services like Quora ever being worth much.
Freebase had no business model and Metaweb took $57 million in VC. Then Google took the public service, which had been built up by a large community, and effectively buried it.
As with most of the other cases, their only possible path that involved sustainability and long-term knowledge value, was to not take VC, stay lean, and either API their system for a fee (not a huge business), or run an ad model. Either way, their business case was small, and they took a lot of VC. The end result, another dead, formerly promising, knowledge service in an increasingly long list.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2018/12/04/quora-ha...
How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
CS major in first year who has been interested in math and science as a kid? Probably not.
First year college in the USA is very broad. It’s not like university in Europe / UK where you specialize in one subject only for your bachelors.
I tried to argue against someone with this. I even tried scaling the problem down to being two balls drawn from a pool of four, and showing how if you buy multiple tickets, your chances of winning greatly increased. And they accepted what I was saying, but just insisted that the math "doesn't scale" and it doesn't work the same when it's 5 balls drawn from a pool of 69.
Even worse, she tried to say something like "You're really good at math. You should know this!"
This blows my mind, but at least it means they aren't wasting even more money on the lottery.
I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.
But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.
Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.
Low level/high volume content took over Quora.
Upvoting alone is enough to make me sign in to SO when I'm mysteriously logged out. SO saves me enough hours to justify that small curtesy.
People would immediately sign up for SO if it were tied to their productivity.
That is, unless answer providers have no interest in using the site for anything else. That's true in some cases.
It's basically a crapshoot as to whether the person is a blowhard or knows what they're talking about.
It wasn't clear if he was working for Quora or working for somebody who wanted to spam Quora, but the damage is done.
Don’t worry how this will monetize. We’ll figure this out later once we have the scale.
Github made it through the "We need to deliver 1000x gains for our investors" phase of their history, but all that means is they've moved into "We paid $7,500,000,000 for this, are we getting as much value as possible?"
A few years from now, some brilliant manager realizes they can "add value for customers" by helpfully including third party software offers with github release downloads, just like Sourceforge did. Who knows?
That's the pure growth first strategy. At first it's all roses. Completely free, even ad-free. So there's none of the friction that comes with monetization. But eventually it comes into the picture.
Either a service is monetized from the start or it comes later.
I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.
I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more discovery other ways and usually only end up on the site after a recommendation, etc...
The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1) heavily penalizing low-traffic sites to the point of giving me top results that contain almost none of my keywords when there 100% for sure had to be sites that contained all of them, and 2) barely paying attention to text linking to a site anymore. I'm not even upset I couldn't find the site I wanted using my search terms so much as that part of their surrender to the spammers meant that most of the top results were "legitimate" content-mill spammers-by-another-name. I don't think I could have found anything like what I was looking for. Any similarly-obscure sites are just invisible now.
DDG wasn't much better. The spammers won and "web search" doesn't really search the whole web anymore, or even close to it.
I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do.
That's frustrating. Low-volume sites represent a significant portion of the web results I need.
I'm sitting here looking at it now and I still can't believe that's the function. It looks like a link to a search of just that term.
Of course, even when I click on it, I get ads for hotels that are missing "proton" and "transfer" first, then random word dictionaries, both well above perfectly valid results talking about chemists who played the balalaika or research done in the city of Balalaika.
Which means that it's a link to getting a different wrong set of results and it's there as a kind of fig leaf on the sin of distorting searches so heavily.
I quoted search terms yesterday, but still had to specify by clicking the link "must include" .. first result still didn't include one of the terms.
Come on Google, what is this?
I suppose that top hit earned them money; can't think why else they'd be deceptive about it.
No one posts actual quality content because stuff I want to read doesn't have a general appeal, its specialized to the things I am interested in. Facebook only allows for general appeal stuff so you end up with memes that everyone can understand.
The conversations on FB range from informative to toxic, and depend, like the internet forums of old, on the moderators. As FB does not actively moderate discussions, toxic conversations are the fault of the participants and the moderators, not on FB.
The curious thing is that often enough you can't even click through--they insist that it's "Medium Exclusive" content and you can only view 3 a month. (Browser Private mode helps, but is not a panacea) But... If I search the 'net for the title of the supposed Exclusive article, I can frequently find it elsewhere with no nagging or paywall.
I don't really believe Medium has the exclusive content that gives it an advantage over anything else, but it's useful as curated, indexed content that you can find elsewhere. This is probably not what they are going for, though.
Sure, but as those platforms grow, they will run into the same problem: having to pay for infrastructure. That shit ain’t cheap once you get past a certain size.
This affinity both for caping up for corporate entities who'd sell you for your component atoms were it feasible to do so, and then for doing free work for them, is so weird. They're the ones making the money. Why isn't it incumbent upon them to do so?
It feels like Medium is circling the drain.
Getting a large influx of funding forces a company to search for faster growth to justify the valuation and deliver projected future growth. In 2017, Medium laid-off 1/3 of their workforce because their advertising model wasn't working [1]. The implication is that they hired a bunch of people to sell something that nobody wanted. A self-funded company, would have likely never hired those people in the first place. That company would be on firmer footing now, but would have gotten less HN/TechCrunch coverage in the process.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2017/01/04/medium-la...
I would bet many of the investors were making a bet on Ev Williams as much as they were on Medium. Medium's business model has always felt a bit exploitative. If they truly are focusing on quality rather than quantity, maybe that will change.
Think of it more as forcing them to make a high variance bet.
The VC business model assumes that about 1/3 of the companies invested in will go to zero, and another 1/3 will make a below market return on investment. They need the Googles and Microsofts to pay for everyone else, so they just push all of their portfolio into trying to become billion dollar businesses.
The problem is this is what VC needs, and if your idea isn't one you're still stuck chasing that goalpost. So rather than be happy with your product you start making distortions to increase your mass appeal to help reach the unreasonably high (for your idea) goalposts set by VC funding.
Or maybe that's their mission and they should do that? I'm not sure why any of us as writer or readers should or could do this.
Companies should live or die by the market and if they piss customers off and lose marketshare, that's the market working for once.