I’ve been reading the musings of Markus Frind for several months now and if you’re into the economics of web development, I think you’ll like him as well.
He runs what is quite possibly the most profitable free online dating service called PlentyOfFish. He’s the sole employee and rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by merely displaying AdSense on each page.
His latest prediction (and he’s never short of insights) is that because of the relatively low development and maintenance costs involved in niche web services, entrepreneurs will no longer need to deal with VC’s. He doesn’t mention Angel investors… but for the purposes of his thesis, investors of Sand Hill Road might want to stake out other industries.
While not entirely the same phenomenon, see also Crowdsourcing.
[...] In an age where you can reliably and securely contract any task to the ends of the earth at a fraction of the domestic cost, do web companies need to go public anymore… let alone receive venture capital? And do you really need to have people from Mensa working for you (see also the seminal works of Jim Collins; in BtL he suggests no)? « Another post without using Flavor Flav [...]
Pingback by Doctor Recommended » Vertical design of firms — July 30, 2006 @ 5:42 pm