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Good lord, imagine subscribing to see rates, seeing that the rates are absurd, and then not being able to back out. What a grift.
Honestly, I'd add death-by-a-thousand-chargebacks to their list of business risks. In their case, it's actually non-trivial.
This is the most perverted arm-twisting pricing model I've seen. I believe the prices, because they are ashamed of them, and have secret hopes that you will spend thousands not to lose your $100!
So, did you pay? I'm not paying $100 when there's no any idea on the pricing of these units, but I assume it's astronomical values given the limited supply.
That is certainly the common wisdom. As is throwing away return legs if a round-trip is cheaper. I've done it at various times for various good reasons--mostly changes in plans. And I doubt anyone is going to get banned for doing it now and then. But if you do it every week? Maybe.
It's probably not even so much because of overselling which I don't see a lot of these days at least where and when I fly. But, if travel goes sideways because of weather/mechanical issues/etc., as far as the airline is concerned it's the ultimate destination it needs to get you to.
Wow that was extremely impressive. You could tell he had a lot of experience in the industry, because he knew a surprising amount off the top of his head.
"Take problem from one domain you know and make a business by being really good at solving it with something from another domain you know" is a pretty tried and true business strategy.
Which is what makes me sad being primarily a programmer. I often wish I had another career first so that I could use the programming skills to solve something there. As it is, I often feel like a loaded gun without a direction to aim in.
You should pick up the domain you're programming in. Like when I was working on a product for the construction industry, I knew all about how certain parts of it worked. I knew all the terms and insider slang and quite a few of the problems they face because I built those things for them. There were plenty of problems I heard about that our product wasn't aimed at.
When I was working for the credit industry, and that was only for 2 months, again I picked up a lot of the terms, asked questions about how the debt buying companies works, how were the banks using the information we gave them, how the debt relief system in the uk works, looked up our clients to find out what they do, ask the customer support team what they do, etc.
Now I'm working making tools for the restaurant business, etc., etc.
One of the things I've noticed is that most other programmers don't. Because they don't talk to the sales people. They don't talk to customers. They don't talk to the consultants. They don't ask questions about why they're implementing something. They don't ask how their product is used.
You have to ask yourself, if you're not picking up problems in the domain you're presently working on, why would you if you'd worked anywhere else?
Oh yeah, there's huge value in building a relationship with other parts of the business at a large company.
A lot of people loathe talking to Sales & Marketing but I always try to have a good understanding of their areas. If you build the right relationship it also gives you great trust and authority when cross-department decisions are made since you can (reasonably) speak to both sides.
I too want to work in tooling. Sadly, we are just animals and want features faster rather than having a low memory footprint (don't know how I'd do it to be honest but I'm sure desktop apps should be leaner than they are now). I mean even gnome feels pretty bloated to be honest.
I think the problem is we are too accepting. We should put our foot down and say no. No to two clipboards on the same system. No to Eudora or whatever running in the background even though you haven't set up an email account with it. No to apps having ability to access the Internet or run at boot or run in background by default.
The problem is if I try to implement this, my best hope is to fracture everything further and realistically I will fail and have no users.
Don't go to your local "I want to build a startup!" meetup as those are almost always useless. 99% of the people there have an idea and "just need someone to build it!"
Instead, check out events, meetups, conferences, trainings outside your core field. I went to a few game developer events and then music+tech meetups and learned a bunch but the most valuable were construction technology. Project management is project management. Accounting is accounting. The industry/situation changes some of the specifics but it's many of the same principles and concepts.
The vast majority are free, you just have to show up.
Would you be interested in a service that aggregated startup/product ideas from people with deep industry experience but a lack of technical skills? It's something I've been thinking should exist.
When people take a look at my "computer" skills, they ask me why I didn't become a IT/programmer instead and make lots of money. I always respond "IT people don't need IT people. Everyone else needs IT people."
My skills are a product of the needs of my environment.
The value of a company is not equal to it's revenue - that doesn't make sense. To give an example, let's say someone offered to sell you a magic bean which caused $10 to appear magically every year. Would the bean grower sell it to you for $10? Probably not unless they needed cash immediately, since they could make $50 from the bean in 5 years.
Instead value of a company is the perpetual value of the cash flows to the buyer. The problem is for startups we have very little idea what their cash flows will be in the future. Their revenues could be anywhere, we have no idea what their costs will be (how many sales people do you need, how much R&D, etc.), etc. So because of that valuation becomes a very imprecise art.
Outside of the cash flow approach, another approach for valuing a company is to consider future buyers. Suppose you have a magic bean that returns 50 cents each year in perpetuity. However, the magic bean is called MagicBeanAI and since AI is hot you know you can sell that bean for $50 to someone else. In this case you would be willing to buy it for <$50 regardless of MagicBeanAI's cash flows. This is what happens when markets start to behave irrationally. Eventually people realize they don't have any more suckers to sell to and their MagicBeanAIs value goes to almost nothing. This is essentially a market crashl; google "tulip mania" for more examples.
He also says he sees the broker business as a foot-in-the-door for a much bigger, broader logistics business.
If you go to flexport, it certainly seems they're pushing more a global logistics solution.
I'm guessing the valuation is based on more than just the broker business.
They've already moved to become a full forwarder, including warehousing, order consolidation and other services (or are in the progress), so I imagine this valuation is based on the market for forwarders, not brokers.
from the article: Petersen told Forbes he expects revenue of $500 million this year, yet that still makes Flexport an underdog. “There are 25 freight forwarders that each do more than $1 billion in revenue a year,” he said.
Startups are not evaluated like that though, the earnings multiplier approach only really applies to big public companies, and even then not so well - just look at Tesla or Amazon stock.
The only aspect of Slack that is like Facebook or LinkedIn is that its an IRC channel that you typically have with co-workers. I wouldn't really consider it a social media website though.
As an aside, I have pondered the viability of an escrow service aimed specifically at people who want to wager about topics like these.
I see this at verious forums, someone says Company A will be bankrupt in a year and another one says that won't happen. One of them frequently pipes up to say, "I'll bet you $100 that I'm right!"
Yet, nobody ever takes the chance to capitalize on those potential bets.
Basically, they would set their terms, agree on those terms, upload those terms in a verifiable way as the terms they agreed to, pay their money, and then wait for the time period to end.
At that point, someone at the escrow company will review the wager and the evidence and decide who gets the payout, less the fees associated with it. Not all bets are easy to judge, so writing accurate terms would be important. The service will supply, if needed, impartial judging of the merits. I suppose the company would also need to have the ability to refuse to accept certain bets, perhaps insisting that they make the goals clearly articulated and demonstrable success or failures would be important.
They might even enable it for multiple parties. Each bet would require a deposit of the entire amount due. I suppose people could even go so far as to set odds, if they wanted.
That's pretty close, though not quite what I was looking for. I'm comfortably retired but maybe I should look into making something along these lines. They don't have to be long, for example.
Watching this video was immersive in a way Ryan has introduced customs brokerage and freight forwarding to the valley and internet to the freight industry. I meant it was PG and Sam asking him like... ELI5 wow
Man PG's style of interviewing is super annoying. I get that he was curious and seemingly enthusiastic but at times the dude could barely get out a word.
Not OP, but I'm doing something similar with huginn [0]; I use it to scrape deals and sent POST requests to an Azure ml web service, which is output as RSS.
Cool project. We do something very similar with an internally made lander for our domain portfolio, and it works well. Lots of serious buyers contact via e-mail listed on whois too.
One thing very useful is to have analytics, perhaps you could add a feature for users to input a Google Analytics tag (UA-000000).
Side note: for anyone who actually wants to sell/buy a domain in a private transaction, I highly recommend Escrow.com as an escrow service.
http://offpeak.io the project my team has been working on aims to solve this exact problem. We help travelers avoid peak season, and peak dates that are often associated with large business conferences.
It seems to be missing all but the largest cities. My guess is that you are manually adding data which would mean higher quality at the cost of general usefulness.
I used an Instagram heatmap to find places to visit/look at during a holiday, I would guess if one adds a "time heatmap" one can see which weeks/months are quieter and which are busier.
The search is really frustrating. Everything I type is not there and then it shows me things that are very far away from what I typed. It may be better to show a list organized by region or show the closest location you do cover to the one that was typed in.
When viewing the column chart for a particular city on mobile, you should add some animation when scrolling horizontally to switch months. At the moment it feels quite jagged and laggy. Perhaps make the action more obvious, too.
Apart from that, great work! I know my mother who pays attention to all things travel and tries to find the best deals will like using this site!
