Comment by Zanfa
1 year ago
> The vast vast vast majority of companies do not sell a product below-cost.
Maybe in terms of the number of companies, but in terms of percentage of market size, I'm not sure. Literally the entire social media adjacent market at the moment, including instant messaging is about offering a service below cost, killing any chance of non ad supported platforms.
> And if the customers are not willing to pay more, it sounds like they're actually happy with the current offering and that's not an area that your fellow humans would find useful for you to work on.
Not necessarily. This would be true in a world of spherical cows and rational consumers, but that's never going to be the case. There's other considerations like walled garden lock-in and network effects that consumers have no control over.
> Yes, one of the responsibilities of a founder is fundraising. If you can't sell people on investing in your vision that is...a somewhat bad sign.
So it's not about "just go out and build a competitor", but something much more complex, as reality usually is. Even access to venture capital can differ by orders of magnitude between markets.
This comment reads like a very rational, risk-averse person convincing themselves why they should never try doing anything new or interesting.
Yes, markets are democracies which are messy and complicated and competitive and hard and not as easy as issuing top-down decrees from the elite.
Right, so we agree that a product being successful has little to do with being better or worse than competitors and more with other externalities?
No, we do not agree.
In the short term irrationality can and does prevail in both markets and democracy. In the long term, the best product and ideas always win. This is why both democracy and markets are durable.
Paraphrased differently, this is the weak-form of the efficient market hypothesis. All decentralized processes have some level of gravitational pull toward efficiency. They're not perfectly efficient, obviously. But they trend in that direction on long time scales, unlike the alternative which is being anchored only to the whims of the fickle elite.
1 reply →