I agree. I ran a company that started making serious revenue its second year in operation. My partner and I made the choice then of paying ourselves salaries, keeping a considerable portion of the revenue in our business bank account.
It was one of the best business decisions we ever made. The income that we saved is paying for our living expenses while we work behind the scenes to launch our new startup. If we had pocketed the cash, I doubt we'd be in as strong a position.
I am working on a new vetnure with some friends, payed for from the cash flow/savings from their other project. It's the best system. Eat out less, build more things.
You're absolutely right. (I'm the author of the post, btw.) I've brought up these issues with Facebook in the past, and I've yet to receive satisfactory answers.
Using FBConnect is a calculated risk for us. It gives us the chance to grow faster (via News Feed integration), to make our site more social ("15 of your Facebook friends are on Trogger. Click here to follow them."), and to streamline the login/signup process.
As an early-stage startup, our top priority is to launch quickly and grow fast. We feel that FBConnect helps us do both of these things better than any alternative.
If we establish traction, and get a bunch of users, then we'll be paying a lot of attention to the points you brought up. I think it makes a lot of sense to have a contingency plan if Facebook significantly alters or restricts FBConnect, in a similar way they diminished the prominence of applications not too long ago.
At the end of the day, though, it comes down to growth. Many startups launch and fail because no one knows about them. FBConnect gives us the best opportunity to break out of this mold, and reach the proverbial hockey-stick a lot faster than would otherwise be possible.
Your post was definitely cool, but I felt you weren't one-sided enough ;-). Maybe you could provide a link to Trogger? Is it still in development?
As a piece of advice, I would recommend very strongly that you get people's email even if it makes registration a two-step process. That way, if anything happens, you can generate temp passwords and email them with an explanation that Facebook terminated FBConnect, but you're still good!
Yup. The takeaway from our post is simple: if you're working with people from successful companies, mention them. If your lead engineer was a high-ranking team lead at Google, that carries more weight than if his latest work was, let's say, managing the database for a potato factory in Ohio.
I haven't used mTurk personally, but I know people who have, and I've looked a lot into their model.
Here's the deal: For a small amount of money (1 to 5 cents, or more if you like), you can pay people to take a specific action on your site, like posting a review, voting on 10 items, commenting to a post, etc.
- Look at 25 photos and click on the parts that are sidewalk ($0.02)
- Enter the title, name, and residence of a US Patent ($0.08)
- Write a 30-word comment to a blog post ($0.03)
- Find the longitude and latitude of a business, given its street address ($0.10)
- Write a one-paragraph abstract of an information technology article ($0.05)
I find it amazing that so many people are willing to do such drudgery-laden, time-intensive tasks, but evidently, when you toss a bunch of nickels into the air, lots of people jump.
the part about pearl jam is what should interest you. It talks about why it is so hard to move away from ticketmaster for an artist. And you can assume the same for a venue if they decided to host a non ticketmaster or livenation show. Those companies may in turn refuse to host future higher paying shows at that venue. Unethical but it has allegedly taken place. Just for reference, but I agree there needs to be a change.
I don't know much about college venues but that seems like a promising idea to focus on.
"Ticketmaster says that it is merely bending to the will of the marketplace--because some people are willing to pay more for good seats--and that it is trying to usurp the role of the scalpers and ticket brokers. But the company is really just angling to be the biggest and baddest scalper of them all."
I don't see what the problem with scalping is. The scalper pays for the ticket, and then provides the very useful service of making the ticket available at the last minute. The scalper also takes on a risk that no one will want the ticket,
I can see that the band/venue/ticketing agency wouldn't like it as they don't get a piece of the action. But that doesn't make it immoral.
If tickets are auctioned online by the ticket seller then presumably the band and venue will make more money which will lead to more tours/albums/better venues etc.
Auctioning would probably work both ways too in that worse seats would be available for less than they currently are now.
It's not just the venues that hate scalping, it seems that most people do too.
For me at least, scalping seems "evil" because it's charging a lot for something of little inherent value -- if I had just logged in 10 minutes earlier than you, I could have had your ticket for 1/10 the price.
A better system in my mind (one that ticketmaster had the leverage to implement) would be a point system - if I purchase a ticket for a sold-out concert, and it turns out that I can't go, I should be able to get my money back AND nab a spot in the pre-sale queue for the next popular concert coming to town.
That way, I still get my great ticket, but I'm not setting an arbitrary value based on demand.
There's no inherent value for tickets (or anything). Their value subjective - what people will pay for them. There's nothing more "right" about the price the ticketing office charges than the price the scalper charges.
It's not only a 10 minute difference, a scalper will allow you to buy a ticket 1 minute before the show starts - that's worth something.
There is, indeed, no such thing as inherent value, but people nonetheless tend to think in terms of inherent value. This is important to realize when you decide on marketing and pricing schemes. For instance, restaurants are more likely to offer a discount on quiet days than charge a surcharge on busy days, and they make those sorts of decisions for a reason (restaurants can be a very competitive business, after all.)
David Friedman wrote a neat paper about the psychology of inherent prices and some related topics:
The closest thing to a competitor that I know of (at least in the uni and arts market) is Paciolan; and after talking to them a bit about their architecture a few years ago - I don't think they pose much of a threat.
TicketMaster on the other hand... they're just scary (for many many reasons).
