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Comment by AndrewWarner | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that people don't look at financials beyond the top and/or bottom line.

But at that point in the interview you've just mentioned that you made $1-$3 per user, with millions of users active each month, and you were paying 10 cents for a portion of those users. Of course the first thing people are going to is the math and realize there's a lot of money right there.

But back to why I posted my original comment, it was more the condescending tone of the "I'm amazed" part of that sentence. My gut reaction would be: "Why yes, I can multiply in my head and it is amazing, Andrew."

Thanks for your reply though, nice to see you in this discussion.

Wasn't it that they paid $.10 per user, and then, if they converted, got $1-$3? Without knowing the conversion ratio you wouldn't be able to say what the margin was.

Great point. We didn't have 100% conversion.

I kept things simple to explain how the business worked. There were other factors like this at play.

By the way, a big one was fraud. I remember seeing my first washed check. That's where someone took a check our company made out for $25 or so. Washed our ink of it, and rewrote the check for much more money.

Crazy.

Supposedly there are special inks that help with that. But even so checks are hard to control, and the company I worked for switched to paypal for international payments.

If you can't determine profit margins from those two numbers alone, there's something wrong with you. :-)

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