The blog of the Mod Notebooks team (formerly Draft), with founders writing about bootstrapping, Kickstarter, manufacturing in China, and running a startup outside San Francisco.
HN commenters recommend its posts on leaving San Francisco for St. Louis and on cancelling their Kickstarter, and cite its about page and photos.
There's a line: if it becomes more profitable to rent at Airbnb's nightly rates than at monthly / long-term rates, property investors will then drive down long-term housing supply, increasing property values and monthly rents.
Airbnb's claim is that there is no evidence suggesting that the line has been crossed, so the only impact of their service is that existing landowners / renters get to line their pockets a bit.
They don't have a leg to stand on if you see people successfully investing in property to rent exclusively at short-term rates, which has started to happen in some markets [1][2]. I'm tempted to cheekily link to their own blog post here indicating that 13% of their NYC hosts are doing exactly this.
And don't even get me started on the fact that while looking for a place to live, landlords have justified their insane asking rate by telling me that the previous tenant rented out a spare room on Airbnb.
1. http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/
2. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/home-sharing-site-san-francisco-evictions/
From http://needwant.com/about/ :
> Marshall Haas, CEO & Co-Founder: A Texas native…
> David Myers, Design & Co-Founder: From New York…
> Jason Cox, Head of Operations: Jason was a fashion model in NYC…
The only one who's not from the US is
> Jon Wheatley, Product & Co-Founder: Born and raised on the south coast of the UK…
Are you telling me in addition of not knowing that people in China speak Chinese, they don't know how to write in their own language?
I never knew Mod was Draft until I read this linked article.
http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-funded-project-ourselves/
While reading that I was wondering, and not accusing Mod team here but just a thought, what is stopping people from using Kickstarter this way (to gauge demand) deliberately? Launch a campaign and yank when it is successful to pursue larger profits?
Promote the hell out of it on Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News (done). Apply to speak at conferences and go speak about it. There are plenty of PHP conferences to choose from. Get your employer to pay for the trips.
Other ideas for passive income:
http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/
The original idea (then called Draft) which went to Kickstarter mentioned OCR (see http://needwant.com/p/draft-from-zero-to-kickstarter-in-5k/) but I don't see anything about it on the current website.
The Hong Kong one is most definitely Ovolo Southside:
http://needwant.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/17.jpeg
http://www.35mm.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Hong_Kong_06-1024x683.jpg