Look into CUSOs. There are players that cater to that niche.
136 karma · joined May 16, 2015
Great idea. I would focus on specialty media. Think things like banking regulations, utility work, law reviews, etc. I think there is pretty strong willingness to pay in those markets and the credibility of the individual authors may carry more weight than magazine brands. Giving those writers a bigger cut might also attract them to the platform. Clearly you need to think about an advertising model here but those are the types of markets I would try to compete in - not serialized fiction.
They just did a series on performance review systems.
I would do the following:
1) Get to stable profitability (raise prices / find costs to cut)
2) Find adjacent markets to go after (what other stuff are your customers buying? What other stuff could your specialized team be good at?)
3) Put together a deck and sell to PE (you won’t be able to tell a unicorn story but sounds like to have a stable biz here)
You are depressed and it’s impacting your leadership. Take a vacation, find a therapist, and get back into it!
I love talking about this stuff, feel free to PM.
System A: get a notebook. Write down what you want to capture when you are away from your comp. When you sit down, check your notebook.
System B: Run your org mode on a linode. Download Connectbot (SSH client) for your phone. You can now connect to your Org wherever you have cell service and work from one always-running emacs instance with emacs --daemon and emacsclient -c. I bought a personal blackberry (yes, I know) solely for the physical keyboard which makes throwing out a CTRL or META keypress much easier.
To get this off the ground, you'd need some sort of coordination, either at the school or government level, to enforce risk pooling. How about free education at state colleges coupled with a higher lifetime marginal income tax?
Another reason technical debt is useful, as touched on elsewhere, is that it's something of a real option.
Options have value - think e.g. Oil futures which are the right but not the obligation to purchase X at Y price in the future.
Real options also have value - certain investment decisions can be delayed (e.g. building a plant or refactoring code) and by delaying them you create an option. Here the option is the right but not obligation to write better code that will actually work :)
I know it's hard to convince clients to change their ways, I have found that telling them they are doing great things they didn't even realize is a good way to start before you "bring the pain". Best of luck!
When you get X customers, you'll have to commit Y resources to fix this one thing.
Taking on technical debt is a smart thing in early stages because it's essentially low-cost, non-dilutive financing. So you should recognize that very real benefit.
However, if they are young startups they might not even realize they are doing this smart thing. You can add value by telling them are smart and giving them the schedule of technical interest payments they will have to pay one way or the other if they are still in business.
The mods should move everything to a non-profit org. The site is open-source already, and you could even use their Oauth to port user accounts over directly. My understanding is that they are just breaking even, which sounds bad for a for-profit but sounds great for a not-for-profit, especially if your executive director is getting CEO level pay.
Now, someone else will spend the time implementing my fantastic idea for me, right? /s
In my understanding, commissions are used when effort is not observable but outcomes (i.e. closing a sale) are. An additional point in my head is that the commission / base trade-off is a decision that depends on how sensitive your salespeople are to risk.
I think you would really want to set marginal benefit to marginal cost. In this case, the marginal benefit of increased commissions would be incremental increases in effort and marginal costs would be incremental decreases in customer satisfaction or decreases in employee retention due to risk aversion. Of course, these might seem harder to quantify that FYE/TAM, but I think that the fraction of FYE is a little made up to begin with :)
That being said, if you're not in a leadership position that kind of decision making isn't what you're doing: you're most likely just optimizing on your own little anthill, so a "profit-centered" education like the article is against might make sense for the worker bees.
Another thing that I think is usually missing from the "train your workers" debate is how much variance there is in productivity, and how actual productivity is usually unknowable unless you have 2-3 months of project data for a given worker (these are assumptions). So hire unskilled contract workers, fire 80% of them, and then train the remaining 20%. They won't have the credentials to work elsewhere, and you've been able to identify the true all-stars using data on their actual work product.
After talking to a lot of people, I agree that:
- Most people treat groceries as JIT
- Most people see the value of real-time cross-store comparisons
There have been other apps & services that have tried to solve this problem, but I think that the "great filter" is making price tracking valuable to a single user in a single store. Before you get a network of people contributing prices, you need a set of people who are willing to contribute on their own. I am currently trying to test if such people exist :)
Some people maintain "price books" of prices they see in stores, and they claim that historical records of prices let them predict sales.
Right now my tests are suggesting that such people are few and far between, so I think that this might be a fail-fast type situation.