I had a startup called lowpenny.com that was very similar to CarWoo (before CarWoo) except we charged the auto dealers to use our system instead of charging users which is what CarWoo did.
The process of buying a car needs to be disrupted but the solution is not apparent to me. Would love to know why CarWoo is calling it quits.
Ian, Braintree is inexpensive, I would recommend you bite the bullet and integrate with them from the start. If a customer is willing to invest their data with you or rely on your services then you should reciprocate and show your dedication by paying the monthly fee + transactions. Set it up and then focus on covering those costs by acquiring customers.
It would not surprise me if there was a correlation between the two. I was a professional recording musician (saxophone) before I was a professional programmer. Writing music can be like programming, however I don't think playing a written piece is similar at all. Lots of electronic musicians are programmers however. Joel Zimmerman (Deadmau5) was a web developer who initially created a house track to ridicule that genre of music and then discovered he had a talent when the song became popular in Europe. He still writes code that creates his music.
Depends on your product. A 37signals strategy would be to bootstrap it and charge for your product (works well with b2b). Or do what Facebook initially did which was start with no monetization strategy and scale it. I would say if you have a great idea in mind that you feel can drive millions of users to use your web-app, do not charge for it and raise money.
Metaconginiton or as the author calls it, "thinking about thinking" sounds like intelligence to me.
Self-control is mentally controlling yourself. It takes an active, thinking, controlled mind to put off what is self-indulgence now for one's own greater good. This may be subjective but I find that most intelligent people are self-controlled by definition.
The process of buying a car needs to be disrupted but the solution is not apparent to me. Would love to know why CarWoo is calling it quits.