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All-in-One SaaS Commerce Platform

Focus on your business, not your billing and back-office. Paddle unifies payments, subscription and billing management, manual invoicing, sales tax and financial compliance, fraud, and more with an All-in-One SaaS Commerce platform that grows with you.

Avoiding hassle is especially important for a bootstrapped company. As discussed in my previous post about the spiderweb entrepreneur, in the early stages of bootstrapping, nothing happens unless YOU do it, so it’s incredibly important to conserve your time and energy.

If you want to absolutely minimize hassle as you run your software business, you can stick to each one of these rules, which I present in no particular order:

filling in for fuckedcompany.com

The first and perhaps most important difference is that oil, like other tangible goods, is rivalrous. When one party uses a barrel of oil, it is no longer available for anyone else. Data, on the other hand, is non-rivalrous: Multiple companies can collect, share, and use the same data simultaneously. That goes for consumers, too: When consumers “pay with data” to access a website, they still have the same amount of data after the transaction as before. Moreover, as big data strategist Paul Sonderegger of Oracle describes it, data is non-fungible; one piece of data cannot necessarily be substituted for another the way barrels of oil can.

Given these obvious differences, it would be foolish to use the “data is oil” analogy to extrapolate potential concerns about the collection and use of data. Yet some policymakers fall into that very trap. For example, many policy discussions about privacy are based on the false assumption that since personal data is valuable in the same way oil and other commodities are valuable, then strong privacy protections would help ensure individuals can capitalize on their data the same way a landowner benefits from owning a plot of land with oil under it.