1. Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt? Is it probably because VC funding expects a >100x exit and most SaaS probably can't deliver that? Or are SaaS founders turning away from VC for ideological reasons (like want to enjoy the process instead of rushing to justify a valuation?)
2. 50%+ people pursued ideas which were not their own itch to scratch.
3. 30%+ didn't validate before building. 20%+ just asked their audience. Effectively, 50%+ just jumped into it without doing any significant and rigorous testing. Probably because the cost of entry and failure is too low?
4. 74% don't require a CC to start a trial. (Either infra costs are very low or competition is intense?)
5. 80% don't offer a forever free plan.
6. Most founders don't know their website visitor to trial conversion rates.
7. "Asking for a credit card before a free trial has
almost no correlation with revenue growth."
1 - If you're a developer and / or willing to learn, you can get something up and running that people are paying for with little to no capital. There are a lot of deals on things like AWS and GCP if you look around (e.g. 5 to 100k in credits).
2 - It's easy to imagine "other people" buying things. When you start asking yourself "would I buy this thing?", you can quickly shoot down a lot of ideas and that's not as fun as dreaming up people that would buy it.
4 - Our reason for no CC is we want as little friction as possible to get started. The infra cost is negligible as people that aren't going to convert don't use the product much during the trial anyway.
> Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt?
This is not a representative sample of all SaaS businesses out there. It was run by the founders of Microconf, and their audience is mostly self-funded startups and solopreneurs. Naturally you will see little VC funding there. As ghaff mentioned in another comment, this is not a sample of typical SV startups.
1. MicroConf, who put together the report, is a conference for bootstrapped founders so naturally the audience that participated was already skewed towards non-VC
2. I believe this trend will continue since there are much more interesting and lucrative problems to solve outside your sphere. My SaaS has nothing to do with what I was doing at the time and came from talking to people outside my industry
3. I'd like to see a comparison of how successful these companies are vs. didn't validate
4. Margins are pretty high in SaaS due to leverage in software. You can likely serve 10 customers with the same cloud costs as serving 100. The only exception here would be if your service was prone to scammers or abuse which would make requiring a CC much more prudent
5. When you're boostrapped (which is where this report is skewed toward), you don't have the time or resources to provide support to non-paying customers. Growth at all costs is not the strategy here
6. I still don't know my visitor -> trial conversion rate because it's not that important to optimize at my current stage. As long as you have a reasonable amount of users trying out your product, it should be enough to grow with. And I'm not dealing with thousands of visitors per month. If you have some traction, you should already have the intuition of what moves the needle like improving the product, making customers happy so you can get word of mouth referrals, reducing churn, building features that visitors keep asking for, etc.
> 5. When you're boostrapped (which is where this report is skewed toward), you don't have the time or resources to provide support to non-paying customers.
I'm highly skeptical about this one. Very, very few freemium services actually struggle due to the cost of supporting free users. Unless you're doing something unusually resource intensive or nobody is paying, the infrastructure costs of having free users is usually a rounding error.
I'd estimate that around 99% of people who use the tutorials on my site do so for free, but the only cost I even really notice is for my email provider. Even at 100x the current usage, I'd still be on the same $10/month server.
It wouldn't be a financial loss but it can hurt your growth. Free users are a huge distraction since what they ask for can be very different from what paying users ask for.
As a bootstrapped startup, your goal is probably to get to ramen-profitability as soon as possible so you can quit your job and focus on it full-time. You're not gonna get there fast enough by making free users happy. Paying users are what move the needle.
That's awesome! There's no one way to do this so if it's working for you, then keep doing what you're doing. Are you running a B2C startup by any chance?
> 6. Most founders don't know their website visitor to trial conversion rates
This is surprisingly difficult to solve in 2020. The biggest issue is (in Google Analytics) how to separate traffic that could potentially sign up for a trial vs. traffic from people who’ve already signed up.
Here’s one way to do it:
1. When someone logs in set a cookie
2. If they visit your homepage later check for cookie
3. If cookie exists put them in a segment called eg “existing users”
4. Create visit to trial report in GA for traffic where users aren’t in “existing users” segment
But it seems like this should be simpler.
If there are other approaches that work I’d love to hear them!
>Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt?
Mental health and emotional attachment I guess, working at a scale you're comfortable working at. The tools, frameworks etc. you prefer, and the community around those can all contribute to developer happiness.
So if you optimize mainly for growth you might throw many things out of the window. I think the more developer you are as an entrepreneur the more you may want to stay within a scale that's comfortable for you.
The VC way seems to be more suited for more marketing oriented entrepreneurs who may not even code and develop an emotional attachment towards their tools, their joy may come more from growth aspect, so basically the opposite of what a dev might want.
> The VC way seems to be more suited for more marketing oriented entrepreneurs who may not even code
Actually this is completely wrong.
Investors at all stages from angel to VCs look for strong technical and product leadership from the founding team. Unless you have had a previous successful startup you will not get funding if you are some random executive with an MBA who doesn't know the technical details of the product.
And the reason a lot of entrepreneurs go the VC route is because you get money e.g. $2-5 million which allows you to set up a proper team and build a proper product without worrying about paying the bills. And because they want their product to be used by as many people as possible.
>Unless you have had a previous successful startup you will not get funding if you are some random executive with an MBA who doesn't know the technical details of the product.
I don't disagree with that, the discussion is about devs avoiding VC funding and why, not about what VCs want and a perfect world.
My impression is that preferences of marketers are a better fit for VCs than the preferences of devs, and it's obvious that they're looking for a mix of both, but this seems to become hard with devs putting their mental health first. They can still make a good living by staying small, and at some point your happiness just doesn't scale with more money.
>And the reason a lot of entrepreneurs go the VC route is because you get money e.g. $2-5 million which allows you to set up a proper team and build a proper product without worrying about paying the bills.
The thing is that a proper team can require different processes than those of a single developer/entrepreneur, and that's exactly what I meant. And while you don't have to worry about bills, you still have to worry about your reputation in your niche. If you've just discovered a market and create an app around that, good, but that's not what most devs do, they create something around their area of expertise.
If your product isn't special, like most ones out there your reputation in your niche is what counts, especially true if you make the typical SaaS app and create tools for other developers.
how would you go about validating an idea if you don't have at least a prototype to show potential customers ? This has been suggested to me on many occasions but I fail to understand how it works in practice. I'm not being sarcastic I'm genuinely interested because if this is possible it would save me a whole lot of time and headaches.
Depends on the idea, but there's a lot you can do before you write a single line code.
1. Of your friends/network, pick 5-10 people who could be potential customers. Ask them.
2. Think of a way to scrape emails addr of people who could be potential customers. Ask them.
3. Same on Linkedin.
4. Build a landing page, buy traffic from G and FB, look at time spent on your landing and CTRs to a signup page which then collects emails of interested parties ("We'll let you know once the Alpha is out").
5. Find a blog with potential customers, pay money to run some article on it that relates to your idea, with links to your landing page. Look at open rates of the article itself, and CTR to the landing, CTR on the landing, etc.
6. Create a public group on FB for people that could be potential customers. (Try to) create content for it, try to get people to join (maybe with ads).
All of these are highly noisy, but it's something.
Also you could learn something unexpected, like: "oh, I get your idea, but we use already use X for that", and you didn't know about X, or you didn't know it could be used for that. This happened to me several times. Don't be overconfident in your Google-fu, it's a long tail world, and you may not be able to guess all the relevant keywords/marketing/angle that a competitor could be under.
The thing is that most people think that idea validation is "Hey, this is my idea, what do you think?"
"Mom Test Book" describes a way to discover valid ideas by asking question, not asking question to validate ideas you had by yourself.
Still not easy by this point of view changed the way I think about it forever.
And now I can't help and see how everyone is doing it wrong i.e. instead of discovering ideas people would be willing to pay for, they have ideas and then look for validation (if that).
If you're part of a community where people do things in a similar way, like a shared culture, you will discover pain points that aren't adressed by anyone, that you can solve for yourself, and if it works for you and you're not too exotic in the way you work (that's the side effect of a shared culture), chances are that it works for others as well.
So you validate it based on adressing your own pain points. The worst case scenario is that you were wrong about the exoticness of your workflow, or the actual size of your community and culture, and keep being the only user. But it's still not a failure if it helps you with your main work.
You cannot get full validation until you have a product and have real people giving you real money for that product. But you can get some data points which have some correlation with future product market fit.
1. VC funding is down, since there is not a lot of VC. VC get pitched by 2000 startups a year, and choose 2. I.e. getting a VC founding is actually an anomaly.
2. Right, this should be much higher. I.e. to be successful you should dig where the gold is, not where you want.
3. See my prev answer, there is no point in wasting time validating since the answer does not reflect reality. If you can get pre-orders than sure. but just hearing someone's opinion on something?
5. Why would you offer a free plan, do you get free housing?
Note that almost 90% didn't raise funding at all. And of those who did raise, 70% raised less than $500K. About 70% also had 4 or fewer employees including themselves. In other words, these are mostly pretty small operations.
Look at the hours worked as well. 80% work less than 50 hours a week. And the businesses are very geographically dispersed. Net Net. These are not anything like typical SV startups.
to answer 1. most of these SAAS are micro-companies or leisure based as some would say. they operate in non-VC territory. You're basically looking at markets that are 10K - maybe 100M at the high end. VC's are playing the high stakes game. ie gunning for markets in the 100B+ range. with regards, to diversity, it being mentioned, doesn't make sense. I say this as a minority individual, because I'm fairly certain the organizers, wouldn't be say in some circles where they can meet those individuals operating the companies e.g there's probably tons of individuals in africa | south america etc operating these small micro-saas. but they don't even know the term or are bothered to do so.
I am actually not surprised. I shoot down a lot of ideas regularly (I am in a few startup groups).
> 50%+ people pursued ideas which were not their own itch to scratch.
I can think of few reasons -
1. They are jumping into unknown places because they already know about companies and software in the topics they are familiar with and think they can't compete on technical bases alone. The catch is they are woefully unaware of solutions in those unknown places. It's easy to get something rolling anyways.
2. They fight in terms of pricing model or other metrics than on product as a whole on easy to push services. As a solo founder and owner, you can afford to price it lower than a team of many working full time or adjust it to 2% unhappy users. You don't need millions in revenue.
> 30%+ didn't validate before building. 20%+ just asked their audience. Effectively, 50%+ just jumped into it without doing any significant and rigorous testing. Probably because the cost of entry and failure is too low?
This is not specific to SaaS , the effects are greater partially explained by your mentioned reason a lot. But software is more magic to people in terms of earning money than other hardened ventures so no surprise it's hard to validate and find market for. Interestingly, lot of techies ignore simple ideas or immediate problems because they think they could have written a small script to solve it instead of being dependent on an external company if they were an employee yet that didn't happen, so why not?. More people need sales training and peeking outside their echo chamber (only companies who need software are tech companies or devs and normal internet users.)
> 80% don't offer a forever free plan
Economic viability and people want to generally ditch products and switch around a lot.
> Most founders don't know their website visitor to trial conversion rates.
> Asking for a credit card before a free trial has almost no correlation with revenue growth.
Mentioned by others already. It's pretty hard to account for. If you post your thing in technical places only (many people who open SaaS are pretty biased in their social network), lot of people are eager to test the thing but they don't convert into long term paying customers. I have noticed many people being burnt this way.
The ultimate issue with all these studies is the sample bias. How did they source the independent SaaS companies (there are over 40 thousand plus, follow power laws and most are economically duds). All samples are biased but there are methods of “correcting” the bias. Historical errors are legion:
By the way the key takeaway from this post is that you can make more money driving for Uber than starting an independent SaaS business. You have to be irrational to start an independent SaaS business (applicable to all startups as well).
In fact the only folk who benefit from independent SaaS are the supplier food chain. Levi’s was the main beneficiary of the gold rush. The SaaS conference organizers seem to be among the beneficiaries of the SaaS “gold rush”.
I hope I'm reading the report right: median peak monthly revenue seems to be larger than $10000. Almost 35% of surveyed business don't have any employees.
The only way for this not to sound pretty promising (without getting into sample bias) is if you live in Bay Area.
It would be great to see a breakdown of the range of earnings and not just revenue per employee. Some SaaS companies only end up working for the ad companies Google, Linkedin and Facebook. In those SaaS businesses the House always wins.
This is maybe asking for too much, but I have come across too many SaaS founders who would have made more money opening a taco stand.
Maybe the best approach to start it as a side hustle and then quit your job once you have enough traction.
> Levi’s was the main beneficiary of the gold rush.
For all practical purposes San Francisco didn’t exist before the Gold Rush and it was one of the biggest cities in the US after. That’s quite a bit bigger than Levi’s. If you’re going to try and make a point by referencing history learn the history or leave it out.
Along these lines, can anyone recommend a framework for developing a SaaS prototype? Ideally, it would include things like payment processing, user auth, admin dashboards, etc. I've been looking at Laravel Spark, but I'm wondering if people have other suggestions.
Huh. I've actually been working on one of these for the past month or so. It's largely borne out of the fact that I couldn't find any that worked quite the way I wanted (Node, Vue, Tailwind, HMVC architecture), but also that, yeah, there definitely seems like an opportunity here for a pretty wide variety of SaaS template apps.
Any chance you'd be willing to have a short email conversation about what you're looking for? If so, my email's in my bio here.
I would recommend Laravel Spark only if the options that it provides are exactly as you need them. In my use-case, I started with Spark, then effectively removed it as my revenue model changed. This was about 3 years ago and I know that there have been meaningful updates since then.
Alternatively, on the admin side, Laravel Nova is an extremely useful admin framework. Some of the out-of-the-box API options for Laravel are also superior to the Spark offerings. YMMV!
> More than 25% of respondents have been running their business for 5-10 years, which is longer expected given the relative newness of SaaS, and the high chance a startup fails in its first one or two years.
Could this be survivor-ship bias. If you failed your SaaS venture in less than a year, you are less likely to be part of this survey.
At the bottom of the PDF they say that the people who filled out the survey got "Marketing Extras". To get a good range of respondents you would have to give out cash to "Verified" SaaS executives during 2019. Which is way more work and doesn't generate any revenue for Stripe/Basecamp
Tiny Seed Fund: Accelerator for BootStrappers, "... we do this all without the headache of traditional fundraising, loss of control, or the pressure to build a unicorn."
So, it provides some clarity as to why BaseCamp (formerly 37 Signals) aided in the production of the report, certainly when you take their own genesis and growth into account. As far as I know they only had one small outside investment, from Jeff Bezos:
This is often characterized as an investment, where the money Bezos paid is accessible by the company to do company things - but this seems to be private sale of shares from founders to Bezos. I don't think the company got any money out of Bezos' check - think the founders got it to their personal accounts. That would not qualify as an investment in the sense we're talking about, no?
Investment seems like the right word to me. It wasn't fundraising for the company, though. It was the owners selling a portion of it to hedge the risk that it might fail (according to the link article). That implies to me that they kept the money for themselves rather than re-investing it in the business, at least at the time.
They're also claiming it was a "no-control stake", so not quite the same deal.
That kind of investment opportunity that says "if you trust us buy shares in our future, but you just get to come along for the ride and get X% of profits" seems different enough from VC investing to have its own name, don't know if it already has one.
> and the high chance a startup fails in its first one or two years.
I never understood why people like to spread this "fact" around. Of course a company will fail in it's first years, if not, it's a company that is at least not failing.
Also, it means nothing, not all companies are started equal and these statistics mix everything and everyone in the same basket, there is too much noise involved for this metric to mean anything.
Because if you're on the VC funding train then you are almost guaranteed to fail in the first 2 years.
Why ? Because your Seed Round is only going to get you 18 months runway before you will need to raise a Series A. But VCs don't tell founders enough that the chances of that are in the single digits.
And so you get these founders with a company that is unprofitable and growing well but not growing well enough to get more funding. Which then means the company dies.
I could never take VC money. VCs and reasonable founders have very different definitions of success. A reasonable founder may say that 15 employees and revenue of 5M and profit of 1M is a huge success. A VC may say that 1M profit is bullshit. They could have made 1M profit investing in index funds.
Due to the increased difficulty of attaining certain milestones, there has been the gradual increase and acceptance of more than one funding event occurring at Seed; ie Seed 2, Bridge, Post Seed. All before an actual Series A event.
Not disputing that VC's (and others) should do more to highlight the difficulty, the slim chances, the demanding road both professionally and personally, that maximised exit valuation need not mean profit-making, nor revenue-generating, need not even mean sustainable if not propped up, nor some other things which would make my response off-topic.
> Diversity continues to be an issue in SaaS. Only 11% of founding teams include a non-male and 21% include a non-white founder
I find this line absolutely infuriating. And I'm disappointed it's right at the start. Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias?
It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religious creed. Look at the emerging African & Indian markets to see absolutely remarkable people hustling & making things happen with having very very little.
Please don't rush from the first detail that infuriates you to the HN thread to post about it. That's the opposite
of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Curiosity looks around to see what's new; fury rushes to react to something old. It also breaks the site guidelines because (a) it will probably start a flamewar, and (b) such discussions are basically always the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Instead, wait until the first infuriated rush subsides, and then reflect on what a thoughtful post might say, and how it might contribute to curious conversation. If you can't think of anything like that, it's the better part of valor not to post. This is the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I think it has more to do with socio-economic background than your race/gender/ethnicity etc by default. You used the example of Indian markets. If you look at who the founders are, most of them are middle-upper middle class where they don't have to worry about basic needs on a daily basis. Again, I am sure you can find the rags to riches story anecdotally but running a business myself (non white male founder), I can tell you that socio-economic status helps tremendously. Yes, you can still start a SAAS business regardless due to lower barrier to entry but you are only thinking about servers/software type of cost and not the opportunity cost that most lower middle class to poor people have to give up on.
It almost always comes down to your socio-economic status and I am in the "big risk taker" group. When I started my business, I could totally risk not working for a year or two without it causing significant damage to my family's socio-economic status/needs. Yes, my income went down significantly and it was still a risk but a heavily calculated one. Even if the business failed, I would be able to get back to the corporate life easily since I had put in 10+ years of experience by that time and had financial stability to do this.
Racial statistics also only make sense in the US where skin color is associated with usually only one culture/origin, and while it's understandable in this specific context be aware than in other countries this is plain racism (and also illegal in some like France) because of the complexity and multi culturally and background that exist between a similar skin color.
Now sure there are socio-economics realities correlated but in that case instead of using skin color as a proxy (which again only works in the US) the correct thing to do is to use directly the variables of that socio-economics background, like education, income level, parent's wealth, ...
Why are you downvoted? Americans are right when they say people from outside do not understand certain things about Americans (like the second amendment or why car culture is so prevalent) but many don't apply that standard to themselves. In many countries race is not a big deal.
I don't think gender has the same statistics relevance issue, because the distribution is more uniform across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Edit: to clarify, I am not debating wether or not the gender and racial "issue" should be highlighted in the survey, just that the racial stats as they are are not statistically relevant to draw conclusions (at least in non US countries).
> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company
The average cost of raising a kid in a middle class family is around 250K. What percentage of micro SaaS founders do you think had less than double or triple that (inflation adjusted) spent on them between when they were born and when they founded their companies?
If founding a SaaS company is free, it's only in the same sense that gas for a Tesla doesn't cost anything. Being one person who has the liberal arts / social science background to understand people, and can also code, and can also design, and can also do marketing, requires many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education -- even if it's just sitting around in the library for a few years instead of working.
There are definitely people who are wildly successful without that kind of background, but I don't think they're representative of the typical people building micro SaaS companies. Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.
> Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.
Proficiency is measured on a scale — it is not binary.
What specific level of proficiency are you referring to, and what is your source for saying that this is the minimum level needed to learn to code. I will go out on a limb and say that your 13% is folks who can read at a 12th grade level (or thereabouts). Note that in the literature, this does not refer to the reading level of an average 12th grader, rather the level that curriculum developers aim to have 12 graders read at.
Also, what level of coding are your referring to?
I will just say straight up that I can teach and have taught kids who have little or no knowledge of English how to code (e.g., with Scratch), so I think you may need to make your assumptions a bit more transparent.
> Also, what level of coding are your referring to?
Just being a working developer. For which the main skill is just being able to read and understand the documentation for new languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.
That said, I don’t think proficiency as defined in that source is an ideal proxy for “can be a developer”, especially given the that “developer” can refer to a wide range of tasks.
Some comments:
1. To pass a FAANG algo interview, yes, the proficient level is needed.
2. To do the bulk of coding and bug fixing that many (most?) developers do, I think that there are a lot of high intermediates (my sub-categorization of intermediate) can do the work and actually are employed as developers. I’ve seen enough janky code in code bases and submitted as “updates” or “fixes” for me to believe that this is widely true.
3. To be a productive creator, I also think the proficient level is necessary. That said, I have seen a bunch of janky creations with questionable efficiency/productivity that lead me to believe again that proficiency is an ideal rather than a necessity.
Literacy is a tricky subject, so I encourage you to exercise caution before throwing around ideas like only the proficient 13% of the population can be developers. There are so many qualifications that need to be made before that statement is plausibly true that it is not worth making, imo.
Let me add that I agree with your overall statement that most successful founders come from relatively privileged backgrounds. There are many reasons for this, literacy being one.
It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. If you have to pay the bills while working on the project then it costs the money you'll need to survive those 6+ months, or it costs you your free time and social life and sleep if you're moonlighting. Depending on your gender, ethnicity or religious creed (and immigration and parental status) it might be significantly harder for you to pull it.
> It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you.
False. Hence me mentioning those other markets where the economic climate is must worse than the US - yet you have people making it work. Kenya/Nigeria fantastic examples.
In Kenya also just some people manage to do it. I'd bet there's no many single parents among them, just like there's no them in US. Or people having to do multiple part-time shitty jobs to pay the bills. Or people that have to take care of their parents or siblings. It's highly dependable on your social and financial situation if you'll be able to run a business, any business including SaaS.
> Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias?
Hello. Might I remind you of the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South (developing countries)?
Or should we forget about all of that?
> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company
Yes, if you have a big cultural inheritance (which was itself plundered and stolen and appropriated from other countries). Oh yes, and you need a big trust fund and upper class parents, or at the least a pedagogical mentor who stimulates you, nourishes your curiosity.
By saying this you are showing me the holy ground you are standing on. There are many hands who touch your life every day: feeding you, making your clothes, your electronics, etc. Check out the True Cost (2015): https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32, or 'Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE
I am up for a debate, and I am happy to be shown other perspectives. Yet flagging my comment seems to be the easiest way to scrub something you don't like, while avoiding constructive debate. It seems to me that you are labeling my writing as starting an 'ideological flamewar', when I would argue I back up my arguments with leading research/references.
When I googled ‘flamewar’, wikipedia defines it as:
"a flame war is a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic"
I am making connections that I think are worthwhile. They might seem overly critical and negative to those who are not familiar with the arguments. Do you want to limit connections you don’t make yourself, and discard them as ‘off-topic’ because you aren’t familiar with the research?
That sounds a bit like cherry-picking to me.
I don’t understand how constructive critique like this can be flagged, and my comment muted/hidden. Are we not all humans typing away at our keyboards here? Is your perspective really the ‘right’ or only useful perspective?
The only reason I can think of for you and others to flag my comment is if my comments are getting in the way of you or others in Silicon Valley from charging your rents? Is it that you see some truth in what I share that you might not be comfortable with?
I'm sorry, but it's a classic generic ideological tangent to take a thread about SaaS into "the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South". If we allow that, every thread will eventually turn into a generic ideological flamewar. That's how the internet works by default, and one must make a conscious effort to prevent that if one wants to prevent it, which we do. Comments like yours lead precisely to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153317, and worse, so please don't do that here.
If you're sincerely worried about the moderation favoring one ideology over another, you're welcome to look through the many past occasions where I've posted moderation comments about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't keep any counts, but you'll find plenty of examples of every side getting the same sort of moderation reply when commenters take a thread in this sort of direction.
So you give the example of Britain plundering India. Explain to me why Indians in America are the most successful ethnic group in the country then, at almost twice the median income of white people?
What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here.
My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1].
In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’.
The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime.
To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]:
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."
The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write:
"Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”
Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States.
And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit.
Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.”
[1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002)
Maybe not VCs, but no doubt highly influenced by existing power structures nonetheless. Not everybody can afford to start a business for whatever reason (money, time, opportunity)
1. Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt? Is it probably because VC funding expects a >100x exit and most SaaS probably can't deliver that? Or are SaaS founders turning away from VC for ideological reasons (like want to enjoy the process instead of rushing to justify a valuation?)
2. 50%+ people pursued ideas which were not their own itch to scratch.
3. 30%+ didn't validate before building. 20%+ just asked their audience. Effectively, 50%+ just jumped into it without doing any significant and rigorous testing. Probably because the cost of entry and failure is too low?
4. 74% don't require a CC to start a trial. (Either infra costs are very low or competition is intense?)
5. 80% don't offer a forever free plan.
6. Most founders don't know their website visitor to trial conversion rates.
7. "Asking for a credit card before a free trial has almost no correlation with revenue growth."