I'm not particularly fan of this or similar practices because A) it's a bit morally grey to say the least, and B) you're not actually testing a business idea, you're simply testing how a product sounds.
A half decent example is Evernote (recent financial troubles aside). Imagine trying to cook up a super quick landing page for Evernote and then buying some adwords. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't get very far because who wants "Notetaking App #784" (which is about all the information you can give in such circumstances)?
Based on that you'd assume no one wants to pay for/download a note-taking app. Of course this is provably false as many people pay for myriad note-taking apps. Where's the discrepancy?
When you land on a products landing page there's far more than just product screenshots. There's also the impression created by the brand, one you've probably heard of before you got there. There's customer reviews, there's well thought out pricing designed to make you pay exactly what you can afford, there's a thousand techniques used to make sure they get the sale.
Effectively, I'd say it's very difficult to distill all this down into a quick experiment that proves anything.
Yeh it's definitely preferable to have one of the two developers your small startup can probably afford spending a good portion of their time rolling out, securing and maintaining your own infrastructure
Looks like you're based in the US. In the UK making sure you don't fritter away SEIS money is enormously important. Effectively you have an £150k allocation up to which investors can claim 50% relief in the form of income tax deductions (plus many other great things).
Whatever reason the accelerator is doing it for (whether good or bad for them) is bad for the company if it's losing some of it's allocation without seeing the money. A lot of early stage investors won't touch a non-SEIS deal.
Edit: Also for every YC/Techstars/500 there's a 100 "incubators" that overcharge and underdeliver.
Uber is more vulnerable to external price competition. Airbnb doesn't set the price of accommodation across the network and so there's not much of a risk of a competitor entering the market at a lower price point. Internal price competition is as intrinsic to their model as price uniformity is to Uber.
I'm not at all suggesting Uber adopt a "Drivers Set Prices" feature but rather pointing out that companies that adopt an internal market have providers that are competing with one another and against other companies on price. Having an "internal monopoly" means the entire company is vulnerable to a lower priced competitor.
I was actually speaking with a a friend and tech recruiter about this yesterday. He mentioned that actually, being a "One Trick Pony" is pretty good for people looking to contract.
Obviously he didn't mean simply knowing one language or framework and no others whatsoever but rather that for contract work companies are looking for people that are highly specialized to come in for a very short period of time.
A Full-Stack Super Ninja Developer is still a good thing to have on payroll but you're going to need some temporary guys that know one part of your stack inside out, especially at scale.
I highly doubt this would ever happen. Any network lives and dies on volume and quality of content and Facebook is a great example of a site that (arguably) has both.
One of the key driving factors behind this is that anyone can feel comfortable sharing something on Facebook. If you're a naturally shy person then there's no need to fear downvoting, the worst that can happens is that no one expresses a positive sentiment. You can make everyone aware of something you're doing or how you're feeling with only the possibility of a positive response. That's fantastic and it's what encourages people to share.
There is an argument that you can improve the quality of what people see by having a "dislike" or "downvote" option, like Reddit, HN or StackOverflow. The big difference is that Facebook is inherently personal. I don't mind the fact that someone might downvote me here or on Reddit but that changes when I'm talking about something incredibly personal to the people that are closest to me as is the case on Facebook.
I can see that they may introduce a way to offer a different sentiment, a dislike where the meaning is "I'm sorry this happened to you" or "It's bad that you feel this way". A way of actively stating you find something to be "bad" or "useless" content is never going to be present on Facebook though. Or at least, I can't see a positive outcome from it.
I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or your boss or your Grandma couldn't use it. Because of that people have historically signed up in droves and it's valuation has increased.
In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.
