Curious how Sam would overcome his lack of relative charisma vs people in politics to win. Paul graham essay on this is more than ever true in the world of social media http://www.paulgraham.com/pow.html
Having friends who have had startups that relied on contractors the death blow is being forced to treat contractors as employees. The mass market model doesn't work when you have to charge 40% more just to cover the additional costs in benefits, overtime, taxes, hr etc. link to good article of friend who experienced this in his startup https://medium.com/@kaleazy/theres-no-magic-in-venture-backe... So the real question from all this bad press will it sway states and cities to start forcing uber to make this change? If so it will definitely hamper who they can service and their valuation.
> The mass market model doesn't work when you have to charge 40% more just to cover the additional costs in benefits, overtime, taxes, hr etc.
Perhaps there was no model to begin with then, no? That 40% doesn't magically disappear. The cost is borne by the "contractors" themselves. In software development that usually means charging a lot more than a salaried employee costs because you aren't guaranteed work all the time and you need to cover your own benefits.
Building a business on forcing people into slavery would be profitable in some circumstances. Building a business on finding free gold coins buried in the ground would definitely be profitable. Doesn't mean you have a sustainable business.
Oftentimes they're just exploiting uneducated and naive people who work these jobs because they don't know any better, not because they want to be contractors.
If we take their data at face value, it looks like about 28% of the cost is Cruft picked up from the W2 model and is not benefiting either the company or the caregiver.
Cruft picked up from the W2 model and is not benefiting either the company or the caregiver
Yes, I imagine those poor, hapless caregivers saying things like "My lifelong dream has been to work 80 hours a week with no overtime and no health insurance, and this damn nanny-state government is getting in the way of my achieving it!"
There's a reason why the 1099 racket is getting shut down, and it's because abused and exploited workers don't have that as their lifelong dream.
I find your lack of regard for the well being of Uber drivers, and workers generally, concerning. I understand that the startup funding model you are focused on may not be as lucrative for founders and their startup backers if they must begin to adequately take into account the well being of their employees, but workforce compensation and well being cannot continue to be ignored and even actively fought against as is the case with Uber.
The additional costs of payroll taxes, overtime, paid sick leave, minimum
wage regulations, benefits and health insurance, unemployment tax, workers
comp insurance, and potential for lawsuits in a highly litigious industry
put us in heavy handcuffs.
God forbid he treats employees like people who may get sick and need to see a doctor, or who get minimum wage, or take responsibility for their screwups, or ...
Basically, he had a good time when he could pretend employees were contractors, pay his employees 1099, and compete against people paying W2, but the party ended.
Well, if they did become employees, I guess they could opt to have an election to decide on unionization or not and then have the union vote on any opportunity to automate... where they most likely would pass on that --unless AMZN undermines union cohesion by having robots pay double union dues.
I was at a dinner last year for the Shopify conference and a dev asked Tobi about a new update to the Rails templating engine and why Shopify hadn't adopted it yet. I was blown away to hear Tobi talking how he personally figured out the extra hardware costs of implementing the update. He is one of the few tech CEOs I am confident has balanced the costs regarding sticking with Rails. That said would love to hear his thoughts on this.
The advantage of ERB is that it's plain Ruby and there is no need to learn another language. For the same reason in the Python world I prefer web2py's use of Python than Django's custom language. It reminds me of the days of Strut's <c:choose> tags and all the others.
Interesting that Liquid is faster that ERB. All the surrounding HTML tags being the same, it means that the translated Liquid-to-Ruby code is faster than native Ruby code, which is strange. But maybe Liquid is faster at handling the HTML part of the page. I googled for some data but I couldn't find anything.
However I can understand why Shopify doesn't want to put full Ruby into the hands of customers. Some nasty guy could have used Shopify's CPUs to make some computations for free. Apparently GitHub pages also use Liquid, because of Jekyll and maybe for the same underlying reason.
I've been using liquid for a long time (heavy Jekyll user), and it is pretty good at what it does. Shopify actually lets their enterprise customers (Shopify Plus) to run actual ruby code (which runs a very limited mruby setup) to help process orders.
I run ReCharge we are made up of 22 people that are all remote. From my experience weworkremotely.com has the best remote jobs. Companies that are actually completely remote post their. These companies usually pay the best but even more importantly they value remote employees more and give you challenging things to work on. If anyone anyone is looking check out our posts their were always hiring great people.
Doesnt need any of these things for it has:
1. Huge loyal fan base built up since 90s
2. People post their Pokemon Go experiences naturally on FB/ Snapchat/ Twitch due to the visual nature of the content (i.e. Pokemon are cool looking when imposed on real world things)
3. When you see people walking weird with their phones out you automatically know its Pokemon Go. Great constant real world promotion
Yeah. Pokemon is a brand that a lot of people already recognise and care about. Your project you're 'growth hacking' for likely isn't.
Then again, Pokemon GO does show the value of one other thing:
1. Having a really cool idea and actually implementing it.
Miitomo (Nintendo's previous mobile app idea) didn't have this, and hence its popularity has fell off a cliff. Pokemon in the real world is something people wanted. Random customise esque social app based around questions and answers wasn't.
As someone who has built a lot of saas products off Shopify this makes total sense. Square, Amazon, and PayPal have already gone down this path and proved its highly profitable. I would be curious if Shopify is white labelling a banks offering or if they are making loans a core competency. If the later then its really dangerous for this area is starting to become regulated and is shifting quickly. This risk is one the reasons Square moved away from doing it themselves to actually using third party banking partners to make loans. Also as many of those in the industry already know large loan providers are starting to anticipate a shift in the economy and are moving to invest in collection services rather than sales. If you don't have a competency in making good loans/ collections then you can get in trouble in a down market. That said I do love how companies like Shopify are figuring ways to empower more entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses. I personally would have though it would have been better for them to open store processing data to qualified third party lenders and provide them an easy way to evaluate, price, and sell loans. This competition would have driven down the price of loans for businesses and Shopify could focus on making great software and just taking a cut off an area that isn't their core focus. Similar model to what has worked for them in other areas outside their core focus (i.e. apps/ theme/ experts market).
I help run ReCharge a billing platform for ecommerce stores. We have thousands of ecommerce stores using a variety of processors. From their experiences I have seen the following.
If you process less than 80k a month:
Use Stripe their API is the best and they just innovate faster than everyone else. Love these guys!
If you process 80k - 250k a month:
At this level support becomes a bigger factor and unfortunately Braintree just kills Stripe on this side. The below forum post alone shows how much people hate Stripe support. I know their fixing this area but its really hard for medium size business to work with a processor without phone support. Braintree literally picks up the phone in minutes while sometimes Stripe takes days to get back. This is killer when your dealing with thousands of charges a month.
If you process 250k+ a month:
I hate to say this but I would seriously look at Authorize or one of the traditional processors. They just provide the best rates and you have to factor how much the cost savings is worth with the increase in implementation pain.
I want to emphasize my feedback changes depending on the type of business your in and how quickly you need innovate/ change your processing. Stripe is really moving fast on new innovations which is awesome. But you have to realize basic merchant processing is a commodity so your paying a premium for non commoditized things like a great API. Also things like a great API are becoming commoditized. Stripe is smart and their launching new non commoditized features like Atlas/ Platform Functionality/ ACH etc. The only thing you have to ask yourself do you need these new innovations or just traditional merchant processing.
The fact Apple Music has 1/3 of the paying customers that Spotify has already shows you the power of distribution. The ability for them to build it into their on boarding flow for all new iphone purchases gives them an amazing edge especially in upcoming markets like China.
Apple Music has literally no paying customers yet, as they are all on free trial. I'm sure they will see a considerable churn from current numbers once people start getting charged and canceling.
All of Apple's previously paying Beats customers are in the 3 month free trial. Once that trial ends I'll bet those customers continue paying. I know I will.
When Apple acquired Beats Music, it was "believed to count just 300,000 paying subscribers."[1] That's about 3% of the current total Apple Music subscribers.
Yea, those were the reported numbers up to the end of December. I'll bet that their subscriber numbers started going up after that as users joined following Apple's acquisition, I know I did.
To be more precise, Apple Music has a bunch of people on the free trial. The more interesting metric will to see how many of those people convert to active, paying accounts after 3 months.
I built 6 apps for another ecosystem (Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/partners/socialproof-it) and had very much the same experience as you. We did the low fidelity approach like you and also found that has diminishing returns as the app market matures. Once we started focusing on one app for Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-recurring-payments we found the returns quickly dwarfed what we made before. For it allowed us to be the best for thats all we did. I would recommend not focusing on two apps but just doing one really well. Doing multiple apps means your mediocre in different things takes all your energy to be the best. PS: Love the idea your going to focus on Apple Watch no one is the market leader/expert so great place to be.
Not the sexiest stock but as someone who has built their company off Shopify I cant say I have worked with a better product/ company in my life. The way they handle third party developers, designers, and stores is exceptional. They really get what it takes to build a platform. I have no doubt thats Tobi vision of building the platform for all commerce will come true. As a developer building off Shopify excited to see what they do next.
I had a different experience. I played with Shopify, and canceled my account.
They kept charging me for years. I eventually noticed, and asked for a refund on the completely empty, completely unused account which was being charged to an expired and canceled card (something I didn't even know was possible until this incident).
Support said no, and offered a discount if I wanted to use Shopify in the future. I said I'd have to resort to a chargeback and I'd let my credit card company see if they agreed with my interpretation of the situation or not. The head of support literally yelled at me the moment I used the word chargeback, revoked his previous offer, and said they had no need to return my money, even though they hadn't earned it.
I wound up in touch with their VP Revenue who agreed that he didn't want to take any money they hadn't earned. But instead of refunding my money, he just dropped contact with me and never responded again.
If they were to respond to this publicly, they'd say I was angry with them. And that's true. I became angry after their head of support yelled at me. I still can't believe that happened, it was the worst customer service experience of my life. My blood pressure goes up a little just remembering how I was treated.
So basically, I'm glad you're happy with them, but they stole a couple hundred bucks from me and lied about their intention to give it back. My experience makes me believe that anybody who had good experiences is, almost certainly, just lucky. That or I'm in the .001% of supremely bad luck.
If I'm truly in the .001%, their vp revenue can circle back and give me the money he promised (I'd be easy to identify on their side, since if they never yell at customers, and never lie to customers, then it should be super-easy to remember a time that they yelled at and then lied to a customer).
I don't believe so. I think I found out that chargebacks can only go back 60 or 90 days, and I also found out that (shockingly) it's not illegal to charge an expired and cancelled credit card on a recurring basis, and I decided to devote my energy to something more useful.
I'm aware that they are going through an overhaul of their customer service systems, process and probably the people. Its tough to grow as fast as they are, especially in this area. It is exceptionally hard to find great people, maintain culture and values while still providing great support. I'm not making excuses for them, except to say that I am certain they are aware of the issues they have had had in this area and are working on getting better.
I'm simply sharing my experience, which involved their head of customer service yelling at me, and their vp of revenue flat out lying to me.
If I'm truly an outlier, I'd welcome outreach from them (in the form of the refund they promised me long ago). But I don't expect it.
Running a startup is crazy hard... but establishing cultural norms like 'don't yell at customers' and 'don't lie to customers' isn't hard. That's easy. And either I had a wicked outlier experience, or they failed to do that.
This wasn't a transfer game. There were bidirectional emails and phone calls. (e.g. vp of revenue calling me in response to an email sent directly to his email.)
The whole situation made me wonder how much revenue would Shopify lose if they stopped charging expired credit cards. It must be material if they're willing to engage in a billing practice that essentially no upstanding SaaS company engages in. Or at least it must've been material at the time.
Yes you are. If the OP story is true, you just don't yell at your customer. It doesn't make me want to try Shopify if they really use these kind of practices. Only shady pornsites do that stuff.
Have you ever actually worked as a customer service agent? Getting low-paid employees to consistently be courteous to angry customers is actually really hard to get right.
You probably aren't; but lots of customers are assholes. Lots of people become utilitarians when they're dealing with customer support: when they want an outcome all means to that end become justified. I can't tell you how many insults I've had hurled at me during my few years as a support rep.
And as far as this customer is concerned; my guess is that he never got the chance to speak to the 'head of customer support.' He got pissed off at one employee; asked for the supervisor and was transferred to the support rep sitting next to him.
That shit happens all the time; heck I've been the 'supervisor' several times and had it work. Call it a 'social hack' support reps often use.
Now the guy should never have yelled and the VP should've followed up on his promise but downvoting someone who politely advocates cutting Spotify some slack based on a single report isn't fair either.
I've used Shopify for my clients a bunch of times, and now I primarily and almost exclusively use Squarespace, which I would say is the largest Shopify competitor that no one ever mentions. I'm a Squarespace power user and one of the biggest designer/developer advocates outside the company. I can say without a doubt that Shopify has one of the most amazing developer communities and initiatives that I've ever seen. I could only wish that other products/services, including Squarespace, would do something similar.
So I agree wholeheartedly that Shopify simply gets it. The way they promote designer and developer usage is off the charts. I could go on and on. They nail it on all levels.
