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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

I think Glassdoor has the issue in that its not a growth business, but needs to be. You can't have a website like Glassdoor that is VC funded, owned by PE or publicly traded and not have it go to shit. The organic usage is people looking for new jobs, or posting about jobs they hate, or companies responding. A website that has <20 employees and is fine with being a $10M a year business living off of ad revenue could absolutely do this and be successful. A business seeking to double revenue can't.

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Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed companies in a market have failed, it won’t dissuade them from investing.

Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024? Why must you raise and spend $20m on marketing alone?

I found Reddit literally through organic word-of-mouth when Digg went under. Never saw an ad for it in my life.

Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?

The thing is you did find reddit via marketing, its just the marketing hit the people before it hit you, that guy that told you about it or the one that told him was the one that marketing got into reddit, which got them to a critical mass that word of mouth can take over.

Reddit's early employees were very busy with sock accounts reposting things from other sites, commenting on them, then messaging the creators on the original sites "hey your thing was posted on reddit!".

Marketing comes in lots of forms.

Reddit didn't start to attract the critical mass until they became the top result in Google though nor it was able to keep its servers with its own profit. Until they squash all possible opponents, such social networks has never been profitable.

Reddit isn't profitable, never has been, and likely never will

>Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024?

levels and blind sort of feels that way, but that's part of the issue:

1. these kinds of sites are a paradox in that you want employees to be anonymous but also verified. So you can't just spin up a site in a week and have valuable data

2. despite the comparisons, I'm sure both levels and blind were in fact vc funded. The models feels indie but it probably isn't. But they did their part for SEO and marketing and yadda yadda. So it got the eyeballs it needed before word of mouth set in

>Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?

to be frank, because most people don't try very hard to find the grassroots. They are lazy and will take the first thing that looks good on Google.

It does sometimes feel like we're missing out on these "reasonable company with reasonable expectations" type businesses and funding and crashing a ton of companies that would otherwise maybe live on reasonably?

What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.

There's even a stigma to being a "single digit millionaire"

    Greg: I'm good, anyway, cuz, uh, my, so, I was just talkin' to my mom, and she said, apparently, he'll leave me five million anyway, so I'm golden, baby.

    Connor: You can't do anything with five, Greg. Five's a nightmare.

    Greg: Is it?

    Connor: Oh, yeah. Can't retire. Not worth it to work. Oh, yes, five will drive you un poco loco, my fine feathered friend.

    Tom: The poorest rich person in America. The world's tallest dwarf.


    Connor: The weakest strong man at the circus.

-- Succession

Can't retire on $5M?

At a 5%/year withdrawal rate, that's $250K/year. That's absolutely livable. You won't live like a king, but that's a solid middle-class living in most suburbs outside the Bay area.

I dunno, I think it's pretty cool to be either a millionaire or a billionaire. That's probably why I'm not either.

> What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.

I think the founders of those companies would be fine with the millionaire outcome, as it beats crashing and burning in pursuit of billions.

The problem is the VC mindset.

It’s not good enough to run a business that supports you, your family, and your employees families anymore. Everything has to be the next billion-dollar big idea that’ll make the books. Even small businesses have the feel of soul-less big business because of this. It’s disheartening that this is what the tech industry has become.

This is the essential problem with any platform whose value consists of user-generated content. For example, Reddit doesn't have to hold an IPO to continue being Reddit, they don't have to paywall their API, and they don't have to make their website a global dark pattern to force engagement; they chose to sell stakes and play the growth game. Medium is another example, as is Quora, LinkedIn, and a hundred other tech companies that are essentially specialized takes on PhpBB forums.

Yep, it's so disappointing how many web projects provide solid value for many people, have a reasonable business model, but go to absolute shit and eventually fade to nothing chasing unsustainable returns. It's staggering how much better the web could be if the demand for exponential returns hadn't become so dominant on the business side.

Like a web mittelstand [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand

Fully agree with that. But you've just stated one of the major problems the software industry has in general. There's almost an inevitable flow that leads businesses that feed on VC funding to develop like this. They will turn shitty because they are as big as they should get, but not as big as they must get.

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