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minouye | 10 years ago | on: Running costs for running a web app

These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to another provider.

If using Digital Ocean allows them to move faster, then sure that makes more sense. But doubt that's true in this case.

minouye | 11 years ago | on: Etsy IPO Form S-1

Net income includes non-cash expenses (i.e. it doesn't explain change in cash position--that's what Statement of Cash Flows is for). Cash flow can be positive with a loss and vice versa.

minouye | 11 years ago | on: Reddit’s tax on Amazon purchases

True not the best wording. Was thinking about it more from the perspective of Reddit taxing Amazon.

If I were Amazon I'd be disappointed not because of the poor quality traffic, but because a top 100 site, with threads on every conceivable topic, can't successfully promote a site with products in thousands of verticals.

minouye | 11 years ago | on: Pricenoia shuts down

There is no way that this is true. eBay has a similar affiliate program and historically I believe they do around 4-5% of GMB (gross merchandise bought) for the marketplace side of the business.

I'd imagine Amazon would be in the same ballpark. If Amazon was paying out 4-8% on 40% of their revenue they'd be in serious trouble.

minouye | 12 years ago | on: Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax

From the report:

Our data consist of daily transactions for 2,807,476 households from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013, and include both banking (i.e., checking, savings, and debit card) and credit card transactions. We observe the date, amount, and description of each transaction.

I'm a little disturbed that they had access to complete transaction information for roughly 2% of American households. Is it common practice for banks to share this data? Surely date + amount + description is personally identifiable in many situations.

minouye | 12 years ago | on: Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax

The biggest sales uptick -- 61 percent for big-ticket items -- went to merchants that use Amazon Marketplace...That means Amazon still indirectly benefits, since it collects a fee from merchants on its marketplace.

Not sure why they buried this at the end of the article. Amazon can still attract price-conscious shoppers by funneling them to marketplace sellers that don't collect sales tax, and can now invest in more fulfillment centers and other initiatives that require nexus (Amazon Fresh, etc.)

minouye | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Pagesnap – Take monthly screenshots of any webpage automatically

I recently started a project that takes screenshots of top news sites every hour:

http://newsabovethefold.com

It's really fascinating to look at once you've collected a decent number of screenshots to animate through:

http://newsabovethefold.com/animate/1 (CNN.com every hour for the last two months--will load slowly!)

I'd definitely be interested in using this service if I wasn't already paying for Snapito.

minouye | 12 years ago | on: PayPal Startup Blueprint

So you get $50k in waived fees and dedicated support for no equity? Sounds like a great deal to me, especially if you are wary of working with PayPal. It's a guaranteed whitelist of your account.

minouye | 12 years ago | on: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

If you're not familiar with the "long-term" thinking of Bezos, this anecdote from Brad Stone's recent book on Amazon is particularly interesting:

Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour, a rate that he believed would allow the company to break even on the service. In an S Team meeting before EC2 launched, Bezos unilaterally revised that to ten cents. “You realize you could lose money on that for a long time,” van Biljon told him. “Great,” Bezos said.

Bezos believed his company had a natural advantage in its cost structure and ability to survive in the thin atmosphere of low-margin businesses. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, he suspected, would hesitate to get into such markets because it would depress their overall profit margins. Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

minouye | 12 years ago | on: MakeSpace, A Dropbox For Real Life Storage, Launches In NYC, Raised $1.3M

For those of you in the Bay Area who want to try this out, Boxbee (https://boxbee.com/) is a similar service that operates in SF. Self-storage is a massive industry ($22B) and if you dig into the numbers they're pretty wild. Best of luck to them!

- Total self storage rentable space in the US is now 2.3 billion square feet

- 9% of all American households currently rent a self storage unit

- 7.3 sq.ft. of self storage space for every person in the US

Source: http://www.selfstorage.org/ssa/content/navigationmenu/abouts...

minouye | 12 years ago | on: Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?

I'm definitely not a recruiter and LinkedIn could easily extrapolate that from my resume. Say for example I just want to do some due diligence on a contractor (or business associate or company exec. or whatever). I don't want to connect, just see their qualifications, general background, etc.

Logged in: http://media.tumblr.com/ba1105d066fd8c3acca2909898d5b603/tum...

Logged out: http://media.tumblr.com/17fe723913901fe9a1e0c0c53b6ba6e4/tum...

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