Even kids who go to law school don't learn how to practice until they arrive at a firm, so this is not an obviously inferior method of training.
If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.
I disagree. The lower federal appellate courts, which hear appeals as of right, don't even hear oral arguments on cases that can be easily decided on the briefs. The Supreme Court rarely hears such cases: if a case was easy to decide on the briefs, the Circuit Court below would have clearly resolved it. Oral arguments are particularly valuable in cases like this one: where the law is clear, but the facts are ambiguous. Should Aereo be viewed like essentially a long antenna, or like essentially a cable service?
We laugh at people "on the lower half of the bell curve" who use the "length equals strength" heuristic to evaluate long-form letters, but the same thing happens in these comments all the time.
More than just cred. I've learned to simply not trust founders who weren't motivated enough by their own vision to not at least take a shot at it, if only to get some understanding of what building it actually entails.
The challenge with this model is that extracting money from users requires repeated action on their part. That subscription money is so much easier. With an average account life of six months, match.com gets about $180 per paid user.
If you went with a Groupon-like model for a site that revolved around sending people on dates, and assuming you could make about $10 on $20ish dates, each user would have to get out there 18 times in order for you to beat the subscription model.
I still think there could be a big opportunity in a site like this, but it's not hard to see why the incumbents hang onto their subscription models for dear life.
I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48 hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.
So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?
Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.
Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.
If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.