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Ankur's avatar

Nikhil,

I loved the newsletter. However, what also needs to be reflected upon is the sustainability of the first two buckets. A lot of businesses, start with the motto of democratising access by providing a free service but run into sustainability challenges because their monetisation models are absent or unsustainable to say the least. A lot of these businesses rely either on advertising or charging the supply end of the marketplace but these models invariably have their challenges. So, in my mind democratising is a great idea but it stands more firmly on 3rd pillar ie Convenience ( = greater value) and delivers more sustainability & competitive advantage compared to Free / Cheaper services.

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Steven Roussey's avatar

Democratizing implies making available to a larger or universal audience. However, just like in this country, having the opportunity to make every decision is not always better, and so for government, we have representatives (this may qualify as "easier" in your essay).

It will be interesting to watch the long term performance (assuming they don't dive into each others market) of Robinhood and Wealthfront. Both democratizing in different ways, but one has far less cognitive overhead than the other (personally, I would like Wealthfront to have a radar map where I could adjust the sectors to my liking over time, so it could be in between).

For SMBs, all the new choices have become overload. Keeping open/closing times accurate across Yelp and Google, making sure you are on the map for Google and Apple, that your advertising is where your customers are, etc, etc.

Sometimes, you would like to just designate an agent to deal with the new complexities of choices on your behalf.

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