[bsder]

No the social gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that.

And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken.

If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you're first, the horde is inbound.

Those of us with real products that can't simply be done with 4 20-year-olds and a dog in Ukraine? We're chugging along, thanks.

Yeah, raising money is getting really annoying, but, if we can't, we'll bootstrap. Funny that, bootstrapping is an option when people pay you money.

And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

[matheweis]

> And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

Ssssh, don't give away the secret. ;)

Actually, startups designed to sell to other startups will fail too when the whole thing collapses like a stack of cards...

Enter Mandrill, which recently found its conversion funnel so ineffective that they suddenly shut the entire system down.

[tim333]

> do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners

I was curious so I googled. Wikipedia: There were 300,000 gold-seekers and "On average, half the gold-seekers made a modest profit, after taking all expenses into account."

So probably better odds than the people doing startups. One person who made a lot of money was Levi Strauss who stated selling denim to the miners.

[tdaltonc]

Is that what happened to Mandrill? I've read a coherent explanation of what's going on there and why, but I'd love to.

[matheweis]

Well the official answer was "this change isn’t driven by profit–it’s about aligning our culture and core competencies with our core customers’ needs. There are many people who use Mandrill as a (free) utilitarian infrastructure service, who are not our core customers, and who deserve to use a company that’s better set up for that in the long run." https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#co...

[jsprogrammer]

>Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that.

I don't think that is true. Less than 50% of humans have regular access to the Internet. Do you really think that more than half the people on the planet do not want to get online?

[jjoonathan]

Economics weights people by wealth. Unless you're a charity or playing a very, very long game, all your potential customers are already online.

[Periodic]

Those countries are getting wealthier and the economics of the world are slowly shifting. We have maybe 1-2B people online with capable devices and abundant bandwidth. That leaves 5B yet to connect and another 3B who will want to connect over the next 50 years as population continues to grow.

You can see Facebook and Google scrabbling over themselves to get a share of the emerging markets. Google is trying to pair down Search so they can get it onto those 2G connections. Facebook is trying to give away bandwidth. They both know there is going to be a lot of money in those markets soon, but no one knows exactly how that economy is going to evolve.

[falsestprophet]

Okay, have fun building a profitable social media business serving subsistence farmers.