Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

There are various markets where I'm pretty certain taking outside capital will eventually cause you to lose the plot as to how your business benefits it's users. This seems to be one of those cases. You take outside capital to grow rapidly and take on scale, you go public for more capital to do more business again at a larger scale. This is all in the interest of a large return for your investors and maybe some retail investors and employees.

I'm not sure how this could ever continue to have the best interests of artisanal crafters and sellers in mind when that market is clearly smaller than the one needed to grow the business to successful after-IPO public company. Someone should make a competitor with no aims to go public and you'll probably wind up with a rather large successful business not beholden to anyone except artisanal sellers and more in line with benefiting artisans long term.

Not everything needs to be a public company and not everyone needs to take on VC money. You have to know your goals and then assess different monetary avenues to accomplish them, you can have a large private company without diluting the vision, just not maybe a multibillion dollar organization but that's okay, not everything needs to be that either -- but it will be what your forced into an attempt at making if you take on outside capital.

Those smaller non-public competitors typically end up being acquired (or destroyed) by the larger, well-funded incumbent. Etsy's acquired a number of other marketplaces already.

That's totally fair but at what point are Etsy and <non-public-whoever> actually serving different markets -- and so not really competitors -- so it's not worth it for them to crush or acquire the non-public company focused on what is now a minor niche to the larger incumbent.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I very much agree that it does tend to play out like that but from the strike it seems like some vocal segment of Etsy's market is no longer actually served by Etsy -- and more importantly (all speculation) Etsy has determined it's not in the best interest of Etsy to serve them so there is some niche to now be captured.

Etsy has been providing it's service at a discount and people are just mad about them bringing prices higher to match their value.

I'm sure any serious seller has considered running their own site, or maybe they have one already, and they know the sales are nowhere near what they get on Etsy because of the built-in audience. If that wasn't the case they would've left Etsy already and not have to deal with Etsy telling them what to do.

A "strike" for a few days accomplishes nothing if people just go back and continue buying and selling. The simple answer for them is to start their own site but that will involve doing everything themselves at significant cost. The fact they don't want to do that should be proof enough for them that Etsy is worth the fees

However, there's literally no incentive for the owners and investors to protect that initial plot. Etsy is so big, that it won't ever fail overnight. As long as it's profitable for a few years and everyone gets a fat check out of it, they are happy. This will always happen. Never trust cult brands to stay loyal to the niche market that made them successful to begin with.

The purpose of a business is making money. Fulfilling a legitimate need is at best a fortunate side effect to that end

That is to say, I find it hard to think of how this problem could be avoided as long as companies are rules by profit motive.

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