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by kmfrk 4924 days ago
Draft a user contract that companies can sign if they will. A Grover pledge for letting users get their money's worth, if you will.

[Sparrow](http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/) is a great example. They were acquired soon after the release of their iPhone app. That kinda soured me and many others.

EDIT: The same could be done for other cases, obviously. Take usage rights on social photo services as a completely hypothetical example. :)

EDIT2: In fact, it could be something YC requires their funded companies to do. That must be pretty popular considering all the Instagram/Flickr debacle.

When was it that Y Combinator decided to ban companies supporting SOPA/PIPA or something to that effect?
1 comments
karamazov 4924 days ago
If you require every company you work with to sign a contract with you, you'll find that no one will sell you anything.

Imagine running a cloud service, where you make $10/month/user, and having to read through a separate contract for each person. Does that make sense?

The reality is, you have limited control over a product that you've paid $5, $50, or even $500 for. At most you can get a refund if you're unhappy with the service you received. You cannot force the team of developers to continue work on something, unless you're paying the millions of dollars that that costs.

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kmfrk 4924 days ago
It doesn't have to be legally binding. The damage it can do to a reputation is deterrent enough.

And it's not difficult to see how adopting it can have benefits: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-a....

A lot of people are abandoning Instagram not because of the ToS per se, but because they were reminded that it is now owned by Facebook. And Facebook's reputation is horrible.

Look at what Tumblr are doing by posting their policies on GitHub, which lets everyone see the diffs: https://github.com/tumblr/policy.

Goodwill doesn't have to be legally tethered. But it can be.

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