Are you seriously telling me that you're not trying to compete with Craigslist in the Apartment Listings space?
All incentives, evidence, and your actions point in this direction. The only dissonance is with what you're saying, not with what you're doing.
Even if you mean it now (in context, this seems unlikely), incentives have a way of wearing down your resistance. If PadMapper actually succeeded in supplanting Craigslist as the primary destination for apartment ads, you'd be outright foolish to not start accepting ads directly yourself ... ___which you already do, through PadLister.___
So how are you not aiming to surplant Craigslist, exactly? There's nothing wrong with competing with them, but it's insanely disingenuous to claim that you aren't.
Yeah, that might be the issue, and I'd strongly consider shutting it down if that would make working with CL possible. I disagree that competition is inevitable, though.
> Yeah, that might be the issue, and I'd strongly consider shutting it down if that would make working with CL possible.
Carrot and stick. That's not a highly principled stand.
> I disagree that competition is inevitable, though.
You're doing this out of the pure altruistic goodness of your heart?
All the incentives point in a single direction. There's nothing wrong with competing with Craigslist. You'd be foolish to not take a piece of the pie -- if you can. Likewise, Craigslist would be idiotic to give away the valuable data that you need to take a piece of their pie.
I'd need to be able to talk with them to see if it's actually the thing they have an issue with before I would nuke that project. And yes, I started and continue this project because I wanted to solve a problem, and I find it fulfilling. Money isn't a strong motivator for me.
Please don't say that - it is disingenuous. Money is a strong motivator for 99.99999% of the world. Money lets you do things you otherwise could not do without that money. It's reasonable to say things like, "Money isn't the only motivator for me."
Sorry, that wasn't specific enough, money past my current point isn't a strong motivator for me, since I have relatively cheap tastes and low expenses. Even below market salary for an engineer, being childless, I have such low expenses that I can afford to go on trips and do the other things I want without needing to make more. Obviously, if I couldn't afford good food, I would care a lot more about money and less about doing stuff I enjoy doing. And of course, that might change over time if I ever wanted to buy a house or car or had kids.
