To people wondering why you would want to move to a standalone solution while Medium provides you with distribution and community - it does not (anymore). Well, not to the extent that justifies ceding the control over the representation of your content.
Tl;dr: Medium's practice of paywalling articles and preferential treatment of those articles over public ones kills the reach of your content. Also, they lock you in by removing the feature of attaching your own domain name. Also, their weird upvote mechanism. Also, the dysfunctional comment system. I can go on and on.
He might not have a nuanced understanding of this issue (although, we can't be sure, can we?), but it doesn't make his tweet inaccurate. He literally was talking about "starting startups" and "rich kids". You can be poor and still start a successful startup.
Yes, privileged background is an amplifier and higher starting point. But you don't need any money to make a startup today. Generally, you need a computer with internet access. Although, even a computer is optional as I know some founders who started with just a smartphone (they were building Instagram accounts).
Having said that, there are some people on this planet who are truly underprivileged and can't afford not even a device with internet connection but the very idea that startups could be built by individuals. That's scary.
Yes, Airbnb founders are privileged, but the mob attacking Paul is missing the message. If you are underprivileged, well... tough luck, you're not gonna build a unicorn. However, you can build a $1000, $10000, or $100k startup.
Also, people there are conflating the terms "rich" and "privileged." You can have everything Airbnb's founders have and still be poor.
> Will you offer the service to fiverr sellers? Whitelabel it to agencies?
Totally. I also think I'll be able build a tiny network of affiliate partners for this app. As I'm the only person on the payroll I could offer pretty much substantial affiliate fee.
> What is your current revenue?
The web service is just launched, let's wait at least a month to accumulate some stats. I'm testing Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads so, and it should negatively affect the short-term profits. But for the first month I would look at something like $200-500 in revenue.
It's a pretty rough estimation for sure but I considered how much on average is made by the Fiverr's top quote image content gigs and did a quick analysis of how many packages could be sold on the verticals not covered by the Fiverr's gigs.
Yes, some of these issues can be avoided by going the long term, but the majority of them still persist: weather, not knowing the local language, troubles getting local things done, condescending attitude, food poisoning etc.
In fact, going long term helps with the internet speed and work place issues only. And even that isn't necessarily the case when staying in some Thailand islands, for instance.
But yeah, you get somewhat used to it. Personally, my 6 month stay in Chiang mai was quite pleasant.