David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty cool and a far cry in terms of ease of use and ability to install and get set up than working with all of the huge big software packages that Tobi had to do when he was first setting up Snow Devil. They needed a business model for this new software that they were going to sell or offer online. I think Chris Anderson from Wired hadn't yet written the book on freemium. I think that came out a couple of years later, but percolating around in these Rails internet communities is this idea of free software, freemium, and building business models around that and they think like, “Okay, yeah, great, let's make this freemium and we should have it no-barrier to entry, anybody can set up a store and just start selling, and then we’ll just take a cut of the merchants transactions as they sell. It'll be really cool, incentives will be aligned, it'll be great. It turns out incentives weren't quite so aligned with that and fortunately, they figured this out pretty quickly. People started trying it and thinking like, “Oh, this is super cool. I can get set up,” but then pretty quickly, they realize either they start selling a lot and then they're like, “Wait a minute, I'm paying a lot of money to Shopify here because their fees are just scaling linearly with my sales,” or probably what's even more likely is that people are making a decision about what platform they're going to use. Of course, everybody's very optimistic. When I sell my million things...…

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