Fuckthis.app – Software products for exasperated people
justin.searls.co
justin.searls.co
Seriously people just build something up for yourself. With AI to help we can come up with fully working prototype in no time. Maggie has term for this and she articulated far better than me in this post https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
> some angel investor . . . said, "what if we issued our own credit cards and then kept all the swipe fees for ourselves?" [in lieu of a monthly fee]
> employees were strong-armed into . . . those corporate cards . . . even if it meant losing out on literal thousands of dollars in cash back and rewards from their personal cards
So the employee should be able to benefit from allocating the company's spending to their card's swipe fees (where said rewards come from), but it's wrong when the company itself wants to benefit from the swipe fees on the transactions that they are actually paying for (via discounted expense software)?
Yes, absolutely. There isn't a single profitable corporation on earth that has employees that don't deserve to be compensated more.
The comments on HN are turning into reddit comments with the massive drop in quality lately. The fact that you're on a throwaway reinforces my point quite a bit.
This wouldn't be called "profit", now would it?
Regardless, letting the market dictate as much as it does also doesn't make sense. Neither does trusting investors/shareholders to determine what's best for society. It's all just kind of broken.
If I can just take any money I "should" be giving to employees and absolve myself of that goal simply by spending the money on the company instead, which every publicly-owned company currently does, then nothing has changed.
You DO realize things like stock buybacks are done to grow the company, right? Like yes, there is a profit motive there for shareholders, but paying off shareholders could also be classified as growing the company.
So again - what are you actually asking for? Please clarify whatever point you're trying to make, because so far, all you've said is "nothing should change".
Let me introduce you to a concept called “dividends”
Frankly, I’d love it if we made private enterprise illegal.
Companies aren't giving away money for fun - I promise you there's a strategy.
If a company decided to sign up for corporate cards directly such that _they_ were reaping all those rewards, that'd be perfectly fine and reasonable and it happens all the time. But as it is, employers are giving away the store by singing up for cards issued by these apps—and the software landscape is such that they don't have a ton of other options.
I don't think an employee is entitled to credit card rewards as a basic right. But taking it away after employees have an expectation of having it is akin to taking away free lunches.
i want a simple game that i can use to kill 15 minutes while i'm waiting in line, but all the version in the app store have been gamified to the point that the game barely exists. so many notifications about daily quests, several different in game currencies, unlockable skins and trophies, accumulating XP to level up ... something.
i'd gladly pay the $0.99 for a version that stripped all that growth-hacking shit out of it.
No bullshit solitaire.
Yes the app typically starts simple, but as people use it, they find that it not exactly fits their use case and they face dilemma. Continue to use and find workarounds or keep asking customer service to get this and that implemented to facilitate their use case. They may even say "I would pay extra for something like this!". Multiple this by thousands of different problems people face and at some point certain asks become recurrent. At which point it triggers board meeting and question what to do? It is not necessarily driven by the eternal chase of profit, but simply to make life easier for everyone. Customer service gets fewer requests and customers can actually use it for what they need. Problem starts when someone new comes in to use the app and they didn't participate in the growth, so now the plethora of extra features may feel overwhelming.
I'd rather focus on apps where company puts stupid limitations or adds features that didn't seem to be driven by customers, but by marketing people. "WE NEED AI!!! EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT AI!!! PUT AI EVERYWHERE NOW!!!" followed by "We'll see what sticks, now aify everything!" of course lessons were not learned after "blockchain everything!" and "we need the cloud accounts for customers!" and "AJAX everything!!!"
Keep your app simple. If there is a need to slice and dice the data, make it easy to spit out the data in a standard way to some other application that is good at doing that. As soon as you start doing more than that, you run into the problem of "not exactly fits their use case" because every business is different and has different processes that evolved into what they are for unique reasons.
It's a fool's errand to think that you will ever cover even a fraction of a customer's complete needs in one application.
The other products he talks about didn't turn shitty because the founders just hate babies, but because they like money. The author doesn't go into enough detail on why he doesn't like money.
Also, I have a proven track record of stopping doing things once they've run their course, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to resist the temptation. Recent evidence: announcing my latest conference talk would be my final one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loTaZAkIZP0
If I may, I would nominate both mcmaster.com and "Mountain Duck"[1].
OTOH, he’s mostly being snarky. I think.
People wont buy it if it is on there.
I always assumed this was because it fell into the space where the people who choose the software (finance teams) differ from the people who will have to use it (everyone claiming expenses) - so any features offering UX improvements are deprioritised relative to features which help the finance teams.