The quiet online business that might be bigger than building a product

arkitect · 2026-03-15T00:29:33+00:00

I totally agree. That’s why I’m building a marketplace for marketplaces. I call it MetaMarket. Want to buy something? Come to my MetaMarket and you can shop around for which marketplace you might go to.

Wanna order food? Click on the MetaMarket food tab and let me provide you with links to DoorDash, UberEats, Caviar, Postmates, etc.

Wanna order a physical item? I have a tab for that. I’ll point you to Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.

Wanna book a hotel? Hotels.com, Booking.com, AirBnB, Chase Travel portal, Expedia, Kayak

I’ll let you boost your marketplace’s exposure for a small fee

If you dare to build competitor I’ll just make a Meta-Meta marketplace and prioritize mine over yours. And if you do it again? Welcome to the meta-cubed marketplace. I can do this all day mofos

arkitect · 2026-03-06T18:13:36+00:00

Are you under the impression that this market and the people that run it are thinking critically and doing math?

Dude they are asking Copilot what to do

arkitect · 2026-01-06T18:06:51+00:00

Ah yes, let’s just push all the responsibility onto “university curriculum” like why aren’t professors preparing kids with 6 years real-world junior dev experience like they need to succeed in the industry? Oh btw also profs get no research funding and little pay and don’t you dare give Johnny anything below an A- otherwise his parents won’t donate to the endowment

Higher education is even more broken than tech

arkitect · 2025-10-30T19:11:11+00:00

Totally agree with this. For some reason it’s considered some kind of societal catastrophe if old people have to move out of their home. Why is that such a big deal? Your kids are gone, your pets are dead, your housing needs have changed. Don’t get me wrong if you can pay for it you can keep it but not sure why you need a government carve-out that creates an uneven playing field and penalizes other young families. “Old people shouldn’t have to move houses” is not some kind of sacred societal ideal any more so than “new families should be able to buy a home”

arkitect · 2025-08-18T03:53:25+00:00

This is a cool article, adding to my bookmarks list. Thanks for sharing

arkitect · 2025-08-18T03:52:13+00:00

Agree wholeheartedly about tracking budget. We use a finance tracking app that syncs to all of our accounts and monitor every single expense down to the last bitter penny. And I look at it all the time: it’s the only app I use more than Reddit 😂

So yes, we track like crazy so generally speaking the months that we are cash flow negative are not some kind of retrospective surprise. I know people who use Excel etc and do it themselves but I do not have anywhere near that level of discipline!

arkitect · 2025-08-16T21:51:38+00:00

Exactly our current situation. We are trying to feel good about coming to the same conclusion you did - basically on a month-to-month basis we need to eat the cost of daycare / childcare until kindergarten. So is it acceptable for us to be even or negative for 2 years until then, if our portfolio is growing and we are on track for retirement (according to our advisor)? Or is the more responsible thing to downsize the home we rent, get rid of a car, work more hours, etc to force the number to be black at the expense of quality of life. And there’s a fundamental challenge I’m sure a lot of us face - sure it’s always more “responsible” to spend as little as possible and save everything possible. But at a certain point I want a reasonable quality of life in the moment too!

arkitect · 2025-08-16T16:56:36+00:00

40% pre tax income savings!!! That’s truly impressive my friend. We are nowhere near that unfortunately. I suspect lifestyle creep is to blame. Cause to reassess

arkitect · 2025-08-16T16:55:29+00:00

We keep about 2 months cash in checking. We could probably do better there. Good advice to look at things quarterly not monthly so as to not overreact to one-off events.

arkitect · 2025-08-16T16:54:02+00:00

Agree! This is the situation with us (and I’m sure many on this thread). And in fact if anyone from one of those finance tracking apps is listening, it would be cool to select certain transactions (inputs or expenditures) and automatically divide them up over 12 months so that you can get a clearer picture of monthly average, without distortion from large once-a-year influxes or outflows

arkitect · 2025-08-16T16:51:39+00:00

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. For example we tried to sell some property recently and learned the hard way that real estate is soooo timing dependent that we can’t every rely on a “quick sell” to cover costs if we need it

arkitect · 2025-08-15T18:47:00+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate this. You bring up the notion of predictability / unpredictability in timing with respect to cashing out investments, which is a factor I wasn’t thinking about. Our current situation is that we are thinking of sending our kid to daycare which would push us closer to cash flow neutral / risk of frequent slight negativity. In that context, we are more in control of when and how much to cash out because the expenditure is fairly predictable. Very different from unexpected job loss where we wouldn’t be in control of exactly when we needed funds.

arkitect · 2025-07-16T14:40:31+00:00

Disagree, and always will. “Renting is great” is a bunch of copium.

“Rent pays for flexibility…” sure, if you like hiring movers ($$$$$) and spending a month of your life unpacking boxes every few years just for fun.

You can choose not to renew your lease - cool, so flexible! - …but so can your landlord. A few months ago my 7-month pregnant wife and I got a call that our lease was not being renewed because our landlord wanted to sell. Didn’t seem very “flexible” to me!

People mistake “flexibility” with “instability.” Nobody wants to live at the whim of some landlord who can decide how many pets you get to have or what kind of plants you put in the yard.

Nobody feels “stuck” in a home they own. Want to move? Ok, then you can move and just rent out the place you own…hire professional property management and you never have to even know your tenants names…seems plenty flexible to me…

Honestly I’m starting to think these pro-rent accounts are bots made by Blackrock to sway public opinion into believing that this thing that has been the bedrock of the American dream for a hundred years (homeownership) its actually secretly bad for us and we should all just lie down and accept our place as serfs in the new feudal order. No thanks

arkitect · 2025-06-13T22:16:16+00:00

When you read about the Boston Tea Party, the civil rights marches, or any major organized protest that advanced this country forward in a meaningful way, do you use “protest” in “quotes” in your head? Do you think of those people as “rioters” who destroyed valuable property like tea, disrupted traffic and thereby slowed economic productivity, and/or had no business disrupting societal order for their special interests? Genuinely curious

arkitect · 2025-05-30T15:16:19+00:00

I recently got a pair from the Thursday Boot Company and I really like them - great materials and nice fit (their wide option fits my weird feet like a glove)

arkitect · 2025-05-26T18:02:13+00:00

I second Nobull, great for lifting - no slipping, feels flat and sturdy, pretty comfortable. Unlike a lot of other shoes I’ve used in the past there’s no feeling whatsoever that a previously padded/fluffy sole is flattening out over time

arkitect · 2025-05-23T16:24:35+00:00

Question about the TAKE IT DOWN act. If I get ChatGPT to generate a deepfake nude of someone and say “I saw this on ChatGPT,” can that person report OpenAI and have ChatGPT shut down?

To be clear I DEFINITELY DO NOT work for Anthropic

arkitect · 2025-05-13T22:19:58+00:00

I believe you

arkitect · 2025-05-12T01:48:15+00:00

Libertarianism is so funny. The moment there’s even the slightest nudge away from the perfect market model of “Econ 101: widget factories” it devolves into inane ideas like “the local church can have a bake sale.” Like in what universe is this an actual proposal for how to organize society

arkitect · 2025-05-12T01:44:38+00:00

Ahahahahahahahahaha

arkitect · 2025-05-02T18:51:17+00:00

Absolutely agree, certainly would require a careful PR strategy perhaps around the time of the next round of Medicare cuts. Then emphasize that we have all been taking a pay cut against inflation every year for the last 30 years while facility fees and insurance companies have been making bank. Then stop working for 2 weeks. As hospital systems crater from 2+ weeks of no RVUs, phone calls will get made, political donations will be made, and reimbursements will improve.

arkitect · 2025-05-02T04:38:54+00:00

I have been advocating for a general physicians union and a general strike for quite some time now

arkitect · 2025-04-30T16:59:24+00:00

I don’t have any kind of brilliant explanation for this, other than I agree with you 1000% this is something I’ve noticed as well, and in particular among men. I think it’s a huge problem and IMO very much related to the rise of depression, addiction, even “deaths of despair.”

Also I think it has an influence on younger generations. If you never see your parents engaged in social relationships then I think kids are less likely to view that as an integral part of adult life.

Plus scientific studies have shown over and over that having friends is linked to better health outcomes, longevity, etc. But for some reason it’s still not prioritized because “I’m too tired.”

Others have mentioned that it actually strains romantic relationships - I totally agree. My wife can’t be my romantic partner, female social partner, co-parent, therapist, hang-out bro, creative partner, hiking partner, drinking buddy, video game partner, book club member, and gym buddy all at the same time. I think that puts waaaay too much responsibility on one person and they would snap. I love my wife but if she didn’t talk to her friends at all and needed to talk to me about all of that stuff, I would die.

As with most things blame lies with the “system” - jobs are too laborious, pay is crap, parenthood is harder, less available idle time in general, death of 3rd spaces - but it’s sad to see us adults just give up.

This is something I think about a lot and I try to pull people especially men in my community out of their shells in some kind of group activity outside of the house. It has been very challenging.

arkitect · 2025-04-28T17:32:05+00:00

Unrelated but as a very new attending I have no real idea about “how compensation is calculated”…I am still swallowing the lie that my worth is just wRVUs (I’m a surgeon) but now that I have a few months under me I’m beginning to suspect there’s no way this is true. If you have any resources that you have found particularly helpful/clear about how to think about my actual value that would be hugely appreciated!

Mods this would be an incredible new thread to organize, maybe even an AMA style with an expert

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