amac

Keep going. Seriously, even folks that are 'successful' by any measure have probably been through multiple failures. That's life, and you deal with it by continuing to try.

Dunn is correct in his thesis, though it's nothing new with respect to the fact it's been happening in offline retail since forever. It's a given that companies who sell their own stuff will have better gross margin than those who sell other people's stuff.

A relevant comparison right now would be between private label and mass merchandising i.e luxury brands and discounters. Both are selling in essence commodity goods and both are doing very well right now but adopt a completely different approach to retailing.

The private label strategy, though appearing as a last resort, does make some sense i.e gross margins improvement. I think this serves as a lesson to those folks operating with primarily or even just operating partly in ecommerce. That is, if you're selling other people's stuff it's an efficiency play whilst if you're selling your own stuff, you've got more room to maneuver with margin.

> It's a giant market

True, much larger than B2C. But there's a reason why B2C is more attractive and the reason is monopolistic. As the article notes, there isn't a clear monopoly or substantial leader in the B2B supply space - a result of the market being so huge and fragmented.

What makes markets attractive is their size and potential to establish monopoly - which Amazon has achieved in the western world in B2C ecommerce.

It will be interesting to see how they get on with AmazonSupply, it's a market they can gain leadership in for sure when you consider the products are commodities and it's mainly a logistics problem (they already accel in this regard obviously)

SEEKING FREELANCER: Remote.

PROJECT: Help build an iOS classifieds app.

MOTIVATION: Making it easier to sell your stuff. (and to a lesser extent, discover new stuff to buy)

SKILLS: iOS development. (objective-c, c++, cocoa etc) The project is called 'Octopus' and our temporary website is at octopus.org. My e-mail address and more about me is in my profile. Get in touch with any questions, or ask them here and I'll try to get back to you.

I've thrown up a concept of the New Mogul type forum (based on Vanilla Forums) I can setup. Check out:

http://www.macgregorindustries.com

If I could get the domain name, would this be something we can use?

Cool. I'll investigate.

Help me market my side project, Octopus. (http://octopus.org)

Do you like commerce? I need help with Octopus (octopus.org).

Octopus.org. I'm currently learning mobile development and hopefully will get around to shipping the app (it's in the commerce space)

This might be the future of in-flight entertainment but like Glass, it will suffer in the outside-world one would imagine.

Move to a city with a concentration of people in the Industry you want to work in i.e Silicon Valley for Technology, New York for Finance , Paris for Fashion etc. Whilst it doesn't guarantee success, it will increase your odds. Remember whatever idea you come up with doesn't really matter, what matters is execution.

Use a popular CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or if you're language specific e.g. Python, Django.

That way you can worry less about the marketing site and more about the product. It also means you can hand-off content and copy to someone non-technical if required.

> Happens all the time, unfortunately. Now, whenever I work on a project, the very first thing I think about is how the distribution is going to work, and then build the app around that.

This. Make something people want is the first step, then you need to figure out the distribution.

SEEKING FREELANCER: Remote.

PROJECT: Help build an iOS classifieds app.

MOTIVATION: Making it easier to sell your stuff. (and to a lesser extent, discover new stuff to buy)

SKILLS: iOS development. (objective-c, c++, cocoa etc) The project is called 'Octopus' and our temporary website is at octopus.org.

My e-mail address and more about me is in my profile. Get in touch with any questions, or ask them here and I'll try to get back to you.

It's got to be said that most of the wealth created in the last 50 years or so has been in either financial or software engineering.

Musk is a bit of a throw-back right to the 19th and 20th centuries in this regard. Humanity could do with more folks like him if we're to see real progress in our life-time.

http://octopus.org. I'm still building it - trying to figure out what people want in many ways.

I learnt the hard-way that pre-marketing is an absolute must. Start by engaging with folks in your space and your potential audience/customer base. Blogging and starting a email newsletter are obvious examples but there's a ton of other digital marketing techniques you can use.

Xero. Works well for both you running the business and your accountant.

I agree with this. I'm thinking about building a decentralized marketplace but without anonymity for this very reason.

I do consulting under my own name, http://macgregorindustries.com, but with naming as there's little science to it, use whatever feels right.

Try the aftermarket, sites like Sedo and Snapnames. 'Available names', especially .com's, are few and far between now.

Often, people forget to look a history but it's a good teacher. Applying history here, look at most successful technology companies and you'll see co-founders (Google) or a founder that hires (Amazon).

Supposing you can't build an mvp, logically, you're best to try the above routes.

phpBB is free but self-host obviously. VanillaForums is a decent hosted option.

SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote.

PROJECT: Help build an iOS classifieds app.

MOTIVATION: Making it easier to sell your stuff. (and to a lesser extent, discover new stuff to buy)

SKILLS: iOS development. (objective-c, c++, cocoa etc)

The project is called 'Octopus' and our temporary website is at octopus.org. My e-mail address and more about me is in my profile. Get in touch with any questions, or ask them here and I'll try to get back to you.

Sure, I guess it does work but from a distribution perspective, they could probably reach a larger audience with apps (The UI could also be improved but that's another debate).

You could argue their current approach works for their mission - though not consumers.

I setup my first Google Apps account with the free version - my domain deep-bay.com is still on this free plan (and I guess will be forever more).

That said, I've paid for every subsequent Apps account as I think it's still the best online productivity suite out there.

> Why sell?

They need to be profitable one day.

Human Software (http://usehuman.com) - $250 monthly revenue, not enough to be profitable but folks like my app (Prospect) and it's enjoyable to run a small SAAS company.

Perhaps. But consider the amount of Marketing dollars behind .com and your country's tld. Add to this multi-billion dollar businesses (Amazon, Google, Ebay etc) using existing tld's and one should question what impact new tld's will make. (Especially if you plan to invest in them)