I used "Regularly" and it worked great. I've now upgraded to my own system which plugs into my dashboard and can generate graphs. Each time I complete a task I can give it a score, which is then graphed. I just use it for my weight, but you could use it for anything.
It speaks specifically to this, and basically says if you are motivated by external forces, that's how you're wired and you should capitalize on it... it is a waste of time to try get 'internally' motivated. A lot of people are this way, and there is nothing wrong with it.
I liken it to a car that runs on gas... retrofitting it to run on diesel (or electric) is counter-productive... just tune it up so it efficient at burning gas.
>I tried a new place recently, only to find out I had been duped by Grub-hub
So you found a new restaurant, the restaurant found a new customer, and grub-hub is cut out of the (future) picture. Didn't grubhub earn that commission in this case?
I have no love (or hate) for grub-hub... but it seems like a business hired a salesperson on commission, knowing full well the parameters of the deal, and then gets upset when they actually bring in sales.
In most other industries the restaurant would be considered the 'bad guy' for trying to take the business direct and cheating the rep out of a commission.
There is no proof GH added value here. Allow me to share a related story:
In some places in Eastern Europe, for a while, you could see these people stand in front of empty, free parking spots in the street. As soon as they would see a car approaching they would wave their hands and signal you to park there. To be clear, these people were not afiliated with city hall or other public institutions in any way.
If you drove away, no biggie. If you parked, they would do a big show of moving around the car and telling you when you were too close to the curb, when you should start turning the wheel etc.
Once you were done, they would walk up to you and heavily imply they should be paid for the service they provided ("discovering" the parking space for you and helping you park). You could safely ignore them and they might cuss at you but that was about it.
My girlfriend used to lovingly call them Parking Consultants.
These GH stories have a very similar energy, with middlemen forcefully putting themselves in front of you when you follow a discovery path _that would naturally lead you to the restaurant you were looking for_ (e.g. by showing up higher than the restaurant you're tying to order from in the Google search).
Well the big problem with the consultants is sometimes they might flatten your tire or key your car if you don’t tip. So it’s as much over-eager help as it is shake-down.
The value that GH added here was that they were higher up than any of the restaurant's competitors, too.
So, absent of GH, that pizza sale, instead of going to GH, might have gone to a competitive pizza place.
So the restaurant has to evaluate-- it is better that I get the order through GH, or that I don't possibly get the order at all, and it goes to a competitor?
Grub-hub sometimes does this without the restaurant's knowledge or permission[1]. I believe in most other industries that's considered fraud or trademark violation?
That's also my understanding of it, that does sounds like a business model based on trademark violation / brand impersonation.
The only reason they get away with it is they target small restaurants which are unable to defend themselves. They would try to create a fake <yourlocalcityname>mcdonald.com, it would be taken down immediately.
That's all contingent both on OP discovering the restaurant through grubhub's tactics, and on it being unlikely that OP would have found said restaurant without the existence of grubhub's tactics.
For example, suppose a fairy told OP about the restaurant and OP then Googled it to get the number. If the grubhub MITM phone number bumped the real number/website further down then grubhub is a nuisance and a thief.
But OP also mentioned they thought they had ordered from the restaurant's web site. If that confusion is due to dark patterns employed by grubhub then grubhub is full of evil wizards who must be overcome in an epic battle.
Only if OP discovered by searching and grubhub bubbling to the top of a search where the restaurant otherwise wouldn't have appeared is grubhub the knight here.
So we need to know-- OP, how did you discover this new restaurant in the first place?
In a lot of cases Grubhub is creating websites that look official for restaurants. Few businesses are aware of this, as it siphons customers from many legit websites thanks to better SEO. There have been quite a few instances of this even with restaurants that they've never worked with.
> when you’re fraudulently impersonating a business
The article suggests diners are calling numbers from the GrubHub app. If that’s the case, the commission is earned per the agreement. Practically, the app provided discoverability.
When it appears on Google or Yelp results, assuming Google or Yelp aren’t being compensated and disclosing this relationship, that is a problem.
They can't both lack permission and charge a single business. If they're charging, they have permission (though possibly the contract was misleading). If they don't have permission, they have no ability to charge.
If GrubHub replaced the restaurant's actual phone number with GH's on Google or Yelp or whatever, what service have they provided? (Hint: the answer is: none.)
Depends if Grubhub did anything to "find" them. I.e. if some googles for a restaurant someone recommended to them, Grubhub buys the Google advertising spot for the name of the restaurant, places an ad directly above the Google Maps result and the restaurants website in the results, captures the click and demands a commission for it, what value have they added?
Would you label a sales guy you hired to find you new customers a bad guy if he camped in front of your door, talked to people coming to visit you and claimed commission?
Google charges me for the privilege of them placing an ad at the top of the search result when people search for the exact name of my business. Or if they type my domain name into a search box. I pay to win an auction to have my business be the first ad when people search my exact name.
Yelp adds value by putting my competitors above me when people search my exact name. They then offer me the deal Google gets.
GrubHub is spending VC money to win the google auction and then they offer the restaurant the great deal of handing over the profit margin to them. They’ll continue elbowing out paying restaurants after that to keep the money flowing, so the restaurant is paying for the privilege of paying GrubHub.
Haha, I like the view, but generally if I want a salesperson I want to voluntary engage in that transaction. Fortunately, in the business I'm in I can just forbid reselling in the licence except for the folks I'm getting into business with. The unfortunate reality for restaurants is that they can't.
Confusing a deputy that you are indeed someone in order to intermediate a relationship between them and that person has a skeevy air to it. It's the deception, I think.
I think it would have been more effective if he just 'called in sick' (if that was possible for him) or staged an extended walkout of engineers. I have all my infrastructure on AWS and the prospect that it could all come to a halt immediately and unexpectedly makes me think of other providers or at least spreading my workoad to azure, google, etc.. and that should get Amazon's attention.
I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.
I agree.. it's the message that there is another 'point of failure' that no one has paid much attention to.
If you want Amazon/AWS to change it's ways, then you need to get the attention of CIO's.
And I think regular walkouts of 100 engineers who monitor the network is going to do a better job of getting it than a single architect leaving, no matter how much of a star he was.
> That’s why entrepreneurs, myself included, waste years of their lives on shitty ideas that will never work, following the popular trend of “ideas don’t matter, only execution matters”.
The saying has to do with just having an idea is worthless in itself, you have to do something with that idea.
He interprets it as a shitty idea will be successful if executed well.
I think the clearest interpretation of "ideas don't matter" is that first-mover advantage is, at best, overrated relative to execution.
Not that I endorse this. But I think it's a clearer way of saying it. The concern is that people are afraid to test their idea and get feedback to improve upon it because somebody may "steal" it.
Squandering your first mover advantage doesn't indicate it was overrated. If you actually listen to the feedback, then you're miles ahead of any competition given a first mover advantage.
Anyone worth their salt knows the idea is a necessary condition, but not a satisfactory one. The execution is typically the largest part of finding success, and along the journey the idea often feels like it fades in to the background and starts to seem obvious rather than novel, but of course the idea matters.
I think the author's assumption is that the subscriber would use the service for twelve months whether they were on monthly or annual.
So, if that's the case, you're better off taking the extra x% percent that a monthly plan gives you.
I think the author was also making the point that while you might have all your money upfront, you won't manage it well so it lasts all year. Could you? Yes. Will you? No.
And from personal experience, depending on who your customer is, a yearly plan can make revenue far less predictable.. for a corporate customer there is a big difference between a $12k annual charge, and $1k monthly charge. The first they will scrutinize every year and question its value, while the second they might not even notice.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I've also found it really difficult to get corporate customers to sign up on a monthly billing basis - they always want to send a PO on an annual basis, and often don't even have a means internally to pay for software on a monthly basis.
I've been on the other side of this in the corporate world too, and paying for stuff was always a horrible experience taking weeks at best, but often months. We'd always try to use OSS when possible, and built rather than bought far more often than we'd have liked, precisely because of how much red tape there was. Sometimes our preferred option only allowed monthly billing, and we went with an alternative instead, because nobody wanted to go through a protracted, painful, soul-destroying process of getting authorisation to pay monthly.
I don't have direct experience with Paddle so I don't know whether it's that black and white. Having however experienced a months-long hold on our payment processor account at one point because of an abnormally large charge (a fairly large customer that wanted to pay annually by credit card), I think it could be worth leaving that kind of hassle to somebody else, and have that somebody else be a bigger player that more likely has a better relationship with their payment processors.
It is the simplest, most well designed app I have encountered... and it is free.