sari

Small businesses are the focus of every self-serve platform and the theme for this cohort is automation. Think about the day-to-day operations of a restaurant chain or a local bar: they likely won’t have dedicated marketing staff on board and their budgets are small and tied to performance.

3. Get Better At Giving Gifts: If you have creative or entrepreneurial friends, you can get them close to tears on a tiny budget: 1. Google "Wayback machine" 2. Find their first website or creation 3. Get it framed It will mean more to them than any expensive cliche gift.

And clearly, there was a latent demand for people who wanted to own work from their favorite creators, and creators who wanted to sell things directly to their fans. That kind of combination was really potent.

This idealistic dream brings to mind Marc Andreessen’s recent confession that the “original sin” of the internet was not building a payments layer into the browser. The paid communities you investigate are an attempt to remedy that sin and ground cyberspace in the material/economic systems that support our livelihoods.

MLMs incentivize recruiting behavior with what they call the “downline.” This is MLM gobbledygook meaning that when an existing distributor recruits a new distributor they receive some sort of financial compensation—typically a % of that person's earnings.

We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

My fear is that the structure of the individual as profile based around quantified status games, has eroded our ability to recognize the intrinsic value of interaction — and in this loss we enable a path towards commodified consumption and transaction around what was previously everyday interaction.