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Old 04-01-2013, 07:58 AM   #148
latepaul
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla View Post
The Amazon-eats-Goodreads (and the rest of the world to follow) debacle offers an excellent opportunity for someone with the knowledge and time to set up an quick alternative and invite people over. It only needs a basic site to begin with with development to follow.
I suspect that without a lot of start-up money cash-flow would be a very tricky balance. Probably you'd either fail completely or level out at a small-to-medium size site (1,000s users) where you couldn't grow easily to the next level without more money. Which could be fine but certainly not an Amazon-killer.

There is a solution to the money issue: find a big backer prepared to invest lots of money up front and wait months or years for you to establish yourself before you're profitable. That gives you time to develop the site. Time to attract users. Time to attract advertisers. However that's basically what Goodreads did and they probably would never have got the VC money if they had hamstrung themselves by promising never to capitalize on one of the biggest assets they had - the user data.
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