The market could perhaps grow to 100x the sales volume, although that seems doubtful considering 7% of US adults already claim to smoke marijuana - http://www.gallup.com/poll/163835/tried-marijuana-little-cha.... There's no way it'll grow to 100x the revenue, though. Without illegality driving up the price, its price ought to plummet until it's about as cheap as any other agricultural product, apart from high sin taxes (which don't help potrepreneur profit).
Parse/Cognito/etc allow you to quickly validate an idea that may or may not work out without having to invest in a backend engineer and a bunch of backend infrastructure. If it doesn't work, you've saved a bunch of time and money. If it does work, then you can start worrying about how to scale it and add more features. No piece of software has ever launched without technical debt, and there's much worse technical debt to take on than an outsourced backend.
What's the advantage of only letting in 100 people at a time instead of making it publicly available? Personally, I'm not inclined to give you my email address without at least some sample content.
That's possible without a password too, except that anybody in the area can MITM you instead of just people who bothered to set up honeypots. AFAIK WiFi only provides encryption on networks with a password.
The current title of the actual article is "21 User Retention Tactics You Need To Know," which is still pretty bad but not as linkbaity as "Can't Live Without."
Based on the examples given in the article and at https://www.paypal.com/webapps/workingcapital/success, which are presumably the most favorable ones possible for both companies given the nature of PR, Paypal also charges less than half as much ($800 on a $20k loan for Paypal vs $1k on a $10k loan for Square). That might be misleading, though, because Paypal's case study doesn't mention the repayment period.
The example given is a $10k advance with $11k paid back, but the article also says that "fees appear to be 1/8 to 1/10th of what you’d pay a typical loan organization to get your hands on cash." I'm curious how they're defining "fees," since I can't imagine a "typical loan organization" would charge 80% annual interest.
Based on the article, the fact that their customers love them. Of course, it's not hard to have customers that love you at the early money-hemorrhaging stage - the tough bit is continuing to be loved once you're turning a profit.
If you're employed, it's generally a lot easier to find the time to do a coding problem at home than it is to actually physically come in during a weekday and talk to people.
On the other hand, the profit margins for Square's customers are generally razor-thin, so it seems like you wouldn't have to undercut them by all that much to steal a lot of their customers.
I don't see why Amazon would want to buy enough disks to support 100% of what they promise and then sell the unused capacity at below cost when they could just buy fewer disks instead. Either way they'd be in trouble if their EC2 customers suddenly started wanting to use all the space they were promised.
It seems like the hardest part of providing these services is getting the content owners on board. I haven't seen much indication that Amazon is better at cracking that nut than anybody else.
The "best talent" would probably rather work at a company without these kinds of allegations than at one with them. They might be unfounded, but why take the risk? If you're the "best talent," you've got a lot of other options.
At these odds, betting on this that Gox will go out of business and hedging by buying a bunch of Gox coins on Bitcoin Builder seems like free money. I think you'd only lose if Gox doesn't pay its depositors most of their money but stays in business, which I don't see happening.
When possible, you should avoid having any userid that could be mistaken for a non-userid number - it prevents a lot of silly programming errors from going unnoticed or turning into bigger problems, and has very little downside. http://www.phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Things_Y...