Internet company?
What is this? 1998?
OH it must be an ISP!
Nope. It's a chat for your website...
Wait, isn't there a million of these already?
* sigh *If there is a million of them, there must be business here, and if an entrepreneur thinks he can do it better than his average competitor, he should definetly go ahead.
A company doesn't need to be revolutionary to be a success-story. Distruptive ideas are exceptionally scarce and they represent a microscopic share of the economy as a whole.
- that is not used in that context anywhere else, therefore
- free of potential legal liability towards other brands, and
- for which you can build up a brand over time.
How come otherwise competent engineers end up with these kinds of suboptimal startup/project names over and over again?
For Powwow you have other companies, all domains are taken, and you will have to fight wikipedia to rank for this term in any top spot. Same with otto, the car company. Otto is popular first name, name of one of the largest European pre-amazon retailers, etc.
Such a waste of money and time to start with a second-hand brand.
(sorry if this comes across as snarky, I really like the project.)
I purchased powwowjs.com (js because it's a javascript embedded app) for $40 after spending 15 minutes thinking about a name I liked. I'd rather spend my time and money building a product that is not yet validated. If the name needs to change, that's totally fine and a lot less time consuming than my current task at hand.
Then use the model outlined in https://qbix.com/blog right now :)
Perhaps thinking of people as employees is outdated. Let's face it, these days the typical company or corporation doesn't care about its employees nearly as much as the product they produce. That's why your grandfather was a company man who worked 40 years with one firm, and today people flit from place to place.
It's also why people make less than they did then. Automation and outsourcing has reduced demand for human labor. Today (Real GDP / Population) is 10x more than in 1950s - so each person is 10x more productive on average - yet back then one regular man could pay for an entire household in the suburbs. Today both parents work, stick their kids in glorified daycare (public school) and still can barely make ends meet.
Perhaps the compensation model should be more project based.
Perhaps we should have single payer basic healthcare, food etc. unconditionally for everyone.
People live lives. Companies build products.
How about salaries?
Combine that being profitable (after base salaries) and fair profit sharing (eg, across all employees and contractors) and you will have people flocking to your company in droves.
sort of like a job/incubator hybrid.
(wish I could patent ideas)
I've heard that Slack isn't really interested in supporting paid Slack communities in a meaningful way (all of the money is in enterprise chat). So I could see a company that's truly focused winning that battle. Facebook on the other hand seems pretty invested in private groups.
Naturally, I wish John the best of luck. Building a company is hard in and of itself, he's choosing to take on a particularly difficult version of that challenge. I hope he doesn't plan to bootstrap a community chat application.
I thought: here's a guy who sees that there is an opportunity to create an ISP that will be privacy focused, and he's going to details all the steps along the way. That'd be quite exciting.
I get where you're going with the WM example, and that's a fair one, but probably not comparable to a tech company like this. Nobody is going to be working for $10/hr or less unless it's fair for their standard of living. Likewise, industry level pay is important and if a good CFO commands $2 million a year but you can only offer $1.1 because you have a bunch of people making $50k, you're not going to get a good CFO, or your hiring pool is going to be artificially limited to those who don't need or care about the money.
Profit sharing with contractors because... imagine Uber where drivers are poorly paid contractors while Uber reaps silly amounts of profits.
I fully understand that people can dictate what price they want. But that doesn't make that price fair, does it? Show a reason that $2M is necessitated instead of... say... $250K base salary and bonuses "up to" $2M based on performance. So if the company hires you and you don't bring profits (remember, profits are shared now) in line with whatever's necessary to pay you that $2M, then are you really worth your $2M asking price?
Not criticizing the content of your project, but I think you make it harder for yourself than you needed to. Several avenues are blocked right from the start depending on name choice, and rebranding is really expensive.