Cloudflare still relies on the "massive amount of free users creating buzz vs. a tiny fraction of paid users". Although not an obvious scam, they may very well go the Groupon way.
https://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebr...
Only on a tangent - it's an otherwise fascinating episode from a database wizard.
Are these good examples, though? Dropbox is down ~35% since IPOing, and Slack is down almost 50%. This certainly suggests the market thinks they were both overvalued when they IPO'd.
Slack went public at $26, it is at $23.50 today. It is less than 10% less than the IPO price.
What happens when the inevitable correction comes? The Fed will run out of monetary tricks, eventually.
No, it won't.
It might run into a monetary-policy resistant situation (e.g., stagflation), but the Fed has infinite range of monetary policy tricks available (literally, there's no floor to rates now that the Fed has taken notice of the use of negative rates elsewhere.)
>In fact, I would be wary of software companies without a base of free users, as that means the company needs to keep spending a lot of its revenue on sales and marketing. I am much more wary of companies that keep or burning cash for years and years with the only excuse that "Amazon did that as well".
I think about this a little differently. Spending money on free users is actually a much more efficient "marketing expense" than classic outbound strategies (e.g., online advertising).
When a consumer realizes they are getting 50% off of a service or product they didn't want or need in the first place, they stop signing up for deals. Also, once the businesses realize these customers don't provide repeat business and they are devaluing their product for consumers who do want it, they stop offering the discounts. Finally, it's trivial to sign up for each of their competitors and play them off of each other.
When does a Cloudflare customer stop needing secure, performant content delivery, and how easy is it to switch to a competitor?